AI agent tools

What is an agent tool?

A traditional automation follows steps someone wrote in advance: open this file, copy cell B4, paste it into that field. Change the input and it breaks.

An AI agent works differently. You give it a goal — "produce the finished appraisal package from these documents" — and a set of tools. A tool is a single, well-defined action the agent can take: send a source document to the form it feeds, add a section to the package, put a photo in a numbered slot, read the rows of a spreadsheet.

Which of those it calls, and with what, is decided as it works — from what it actually finds in your files, not from a branch someone wrote in advance. Twenty-two photos and a form with six slots is a judgement call. So is a folder where the survey, the tax record and last year's report all arrived with unhelpful filenames.

What the agent decides — and what it doesn't

This is the part worth being precise about, because "an AI does it" is not a reassuring answer when the output goes to a lender or a city agency.

The agent decides the matching. Which uploaded document belongs to which form. Which image goes in which slot. Which text is wrong and what it should say instead. How many sections a spreadsheet's rows require.

The agent does not decide the shape of the deliverable. Which forms make up a package, and in what order, is fixed per workflow before the agent runs. Neither does it choose the document processing — merging the parts, stamping headers, flattening the result. Those happen on every package, the same way each time.

That division is deliberate, and it is what makes the output reviewable. Two packages produced from the same workflow have the same forms in the same order, so a reviewer knows where to look. The agent's judgement is spent on the messy half of the problem — your input pile — and not on the half that should never vary.

One agent per workflow, not one agent for everything

There is no single agent with every tool below. Each workflow we deploy gets its own agent and its own toolset: appraisal packages, contractor bid responses, and inspection records built from a spreadsheet are three separate agents today. They overlap, but only one tool — listing what has been uploaded — is common to all three.

So this catalog is the union, not a menu any one agent sees. Each page says which workflows its tool is available in.

Agent tools and document processing

The catalog has two halves, and the difference matters. The 17 agent tools are the actions the agent calls. The 11 document processing pages are the pipeline that runs automatically around it — before the agent sees a file and after it finishes. Nobody selects those; they are how the finished PDF gets built.

We add tools as we take on new workflows, so this catalog grows. If your process needs something that isn't here, building it is part of the setup work — see pricing for how that works.