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# System prepended metadata

title: openai-agents-overview

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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) →