Agents ====== Learn how to build, deploy, and optimize agent workflows with AgentKit. Agents are systems that intelligently accomplish tasks—from simple goals to complex, open-ended workflows. OpenAI provides models with agentic strengths, a toolkit for agent creation and deploys, and dashboard features for monitoring and optimizing agents. AgentKit -------- AgentKit is a modular toolkit for building, deploying, and optimizing agents. ![Build](https://cdn.openai.com/API/docs/images/build.png) [Build](/docs/guides/agent-builder) Create workflows with Agent Builder, a visual canvas with starter templates ![Deploy](https://cdn.openai.com/API/docs/images/chatkit-1.png) Deploy Use ChatKit to embed your agent workflows in your frontend ](/docs/guides/chatkit)[ ![Optimize](https://cdn.openai.com/API/docs/images/deploy.png) Optimize Build robust evals to observe and improve agent performance ](/docs/guides/agent-evals) How to build an agent --------------------- Building an agent is a process of designing workflows and connecting pieces of the OpenAI platform to meet your goals. Agent Builder brings all these primitives into one UI. |Goal|What to use|Description| |---|---|---| |Build an agent workflow|Agent Builder|Visual canvas for creating agent workflows. Brings models, tools, knowledge, and logic all into one place.| |Connect to LLMs|OpenAI models|Core intelligence capable of reasoning, making decisions, and processing data. Select your model in Agent Builder.| |Equip your agent|Tools, guardrails|Access to third-party services with connectors and MCP, search vector stores, and prevent misuse.| |Provide knowledge and memory|Vector stores, file search, embeddings|External and persistent knowledge for more relevant information for your use case, hosted by OpenAI.| |Add control-flow logic|Logic nodes|Custom logic for how agents work together, handle conditions, and route to other agents.| |Write your own code|Agents SDK|Build agentic applications, with tools and orchestration, instead of using Agent Builder as the backend.| To build a voice agent that understands audio and responds in natural language, see the [voice agents docs](/docs/guides/voice-agents). Voice agents are not supported in Agent Builder. Deploy agents in your product ----------------------------- When you're ready to bring your agent to production, use ChatKit to bring the agent workflow into your product UI, with an embeddable chat connected to your agentic backend. |Goal|What to use|Description| |---|---|---| |Embed your agent|ChatKit|Customizable UI component. Paste your workflow ID to embed your agent workflow in your product.| |Get more customization|Advanced ChatKit|Run ChatKit on your own infrastructure. Use widgets and connect to any agentic backend with SDKs.| Optimize agent performance -------------------------- Use the OpenAI platform to evaluate agent performance and automate improvements. |Goal|What to use|Description| |---|---|---| |Evaluate agent performance|Evals features|Full evaluation platform, including support for external model evaluation.| |Automate trace grading|Trace grading|Develop, deploy, monitor, and improve agents.| |Build and track evals|Datasets|A collaborative interface to build agent-level evals in a test environment.| |Optimize prompts|Prompt optimizer|Measure agent performance, identify areas for improvement, and refine your agents.| Get started ----------- Design an agent workflow with [Agent Builder](/docs/guides/agent-builder) →