> Source: https://mywaypoint.ai/docs/platform/agents
> Documentation index: https://mywaypoint.ai/llms.txt

# Agents as steps

**An agent step is where a pipeline needs judgement, so an automation handles the cases a fixed rule never could. It reads what the steps before it produced, uses the tools you connected to look things up or act & hands the next step an answer in the shape you asked for.**


## For

- [How Chip Works](https://mywaypoint.ai/how-chip-works)
- [Chip Build guide](https://mywaypoint.ai/docs/build)

## In

- [Jira Cloud](https://mywaypoint.ai/docs/integrations#jira-cloud)
- [Salesforce](https://mywaypoint.ai/docs/integrations#salesforce)
- [Confluence](https://mywaypoint.ai/docs/integrations#confluence)

## What an agent step does

Most steps do one fixed thing. An agent step reads, works out what it needs, calls its tools as many times as the task takes & then answers. You give it three things: a prompt saying what it is for & when to use each tool, the data from the steps before it & the shape of the answer you want. Read the case & decide which team it belongs to. Check the account before drafting the reply. Pull the fields out of the attachment & file them.

## Tools are connections you draw

An agent has exactly the tools you connect to it on the canvas, so you decide what it can reach. Draw a connection from the agent to a step & that step becomes a tool the agent calls when it decides to: search earlier cases, read a ticket, list the rows of a table, run a read-only query, post a message. Another agent can be a tool, so a searcher hands off to a reader. Servers you run that speak MCP plug in as toolsets. Every tool call is recorded in the run with what the agent asked & what came back, so the record shows what it did.

![An agent step on the canvas with two tools drawn to it by dashed connections, one that reads an issue & one that searches earlier tickets, beside the solid line carrying the pipeline on to its next step.](https://mywaypoint.ai/static/assets/chip-build/agent-tools-connected.png "Figure 1: the tools an agent can reach are the ones drawn to it.")

## Answers the next step can use

Ask for the answer as a record or as rows of one of your tables & the agent's output is checked against that shape before the next step sees it. Ask for a list & you get one item per match, ready to fan out. A step downstream of an agent never has to parse prose.

## How a team scopes an agent

- **The prompt.** What it is for, when to use each tool, what to leave alone.
- **The tools.** The smallest set that does the job; count the ones that write or send, because a misread instruction there becomes something that really happened.
- **The model.** A fast tier, the smartest tier for real multi-step reasoning or a model configuration of your own. See [Where it runs](https://mywaypoint.ai/docs/platform/deployment).
- **The output shape**, so the step after it reads data.
- **Tests.** Keep the real agent, replace its tools with stand-ins & assert on what it tried to do, which tools with which arguments, never on its exact words. For a judgement call, a second agent sits as judge.

## Chip's own agents

Chip Build is an agent too, working with you in a conversation. It reads your workspace, asks the one question that changes the build, shows the plan & then creates tables, views, pipelines & documents with the same building blocks you would use by hand, within your own permissions. A pipeline's agent is a step: it runs unattended every time the trigger fires, on that run's data, with only the tools drawn to it. When an automation needs judgement, Chip builds that step for you & leaves it as a draft you switch on.