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Custom AI Employees

Custom AI Employees are specialized digital team members you build from scratch to handle specific business functions. Unlike pre-configured AI Employees (Chat Receptionist, Voice Receptionist, Reputation Specialist), custom employees give you full control over their role, behavior, and capabilities.

Pre-configured vs. custom AI employees​

Pre-configured AI Employees come ready to use with a defined role, built-in capabilities, and tested prompts. They cover common use cases like answering customer chats, handling phone calls, and managing reviews. You can adjust their settings, but their core function is already set.

Custom AI Employees start as a blank slate. You define:

  • Role prompt: the personality, voice, and behavioral guidelines
  • Capabilities: which built-in capabilities to enable, plus any custom capabilities you create
  • Knowledge sources: business-specific information the AI draws from
  • Channels: where the AI Employee operates

When to build a custom AI Employee​

Build a custom AI Employee when you want to expand your workforce with a specialized role not covered by a pre-configured option, such as:

  • An AI Data Analyst that reasons through CRM, review, and social data to deliver structured insights
  • An Inside Sales Representative that qualifies inbound leads before capturing contact information or booking appointments
  • An AI Support Employee that resolves customer inquiries via chat and SMS, and escalates with structured message capture when a question falls outside the knowledge base
  • A compliance assistant that checks processes against internal policies
  • Any role where the default AI Employees don't match your workflow

Setup process​

Every custom AI Employee follows these steps:

  1. Create the employee: name, avatar, and basic profile
  2. Write the role prompt: define personality, voice, and behavioral rules in the Purpose field
  3. Add capabilities: enable built-in capabilities and create custom ones as needed
  4. Connect knowledge sources: business profile, website, documents
  5. Test and refine: verify the AI responds correctly across scenarios

For detailed instructions, see How to Create Custom Capabilities.

Available guides​

  • AI Data Analyst: analyze CRM data, reviews, and social engagement with structured AIR (Analyze, Interpret, Recommend) reasoning
  • Inside Sales Representative: qualify inbound leads, capture contact information, and book appointments with a sales-first conversational approach
  • AI Support Employee: resolve customer support inquiries via chat and SMS, with structured empathy for complaints and automatic escalation when questions fall outside the knowledge base