Designing an agent: goal, instructions, tools, boundaries

Most weak agents are weak on paper before anyone opens the builder. Elena and Maria spend a morning writing the design: what the agent is for, what it must never do, which tools it gets, and when it hands over to a person. SAP's best practices for Joule agents say the same thing in builder terms: be clear and specific, use step-by-step logic, avoid conflicting rules, and restrict the toolset to what the job needs.

The agent design canvas

From canvas to the agent editor

In the classic agent builder you choose Create > Joule Agent, give a name and a description, and fill three text fields. SAP's tutorial explains that the description helps Joule decide when to activate the agent, so it must be specific and business-oriented. Expertise is a short summary of what the agent is good at. Instructions are the step-by-step behavior: what to collect first, how to evaluate results, how to conclude. Additional Context carries tone and rules. Together with the tool descriptions, these four elements form the agent's prompt, as course sap-ai-201 explained.

1. Expertise: "You help Contoso Motor Co. order-to-cash clerks find the current status of fleet customer sales orders in sales area 1710 / 10 / 00."
2. Instructions: "1. Identify the sales order from the order number or the customer purchase order number. 2. Retrieve order status. 3. If the order has a credit or delivery block, stop and escalate. 4. Otherwise retrieve delivery and billing status. 5. Answer with document numbers, quantities and dates. 6. Offer an expedite request only if delivery is not yet goods-issued."
3. Additional Context: "Be brief and factual. Never promise delivery dates the documents do not show. Do not discuss prices, discounts or credit limits. If a request concerns company code 1910, say it is out of scope."

Tools and boundaries

The toolset is the hard boundary. An agent can only do what its tools allow, however its instructions are phrased, so Elena gives it read skills for status and one process skill that requests an expedite rather than changing the delivery. Write-capable tools need a confirmation step: SAP's skill guidance calls a confirmation before any create, update or delete a critical requirement. Keep tool descriptions precise, because the model chooses tools from their descriptions; two tools with overlapping descriptions produce random choices.

Designing the handover

Escalation is a feature, not a failure. Write down who receives the handover, through which channel, and what the agent passes on so the person does not start from zero: the order number, what the agent already looked up, the reason for escalation and the clerk’s question in the clerk’s words. For Contoso, credit blocks go to the credit team’s queue and complaints go to the O2C supervisor. The agent then tells the clerk who has the case and what happens next. Test the handover content as carefully as the answers: an escalation with missing details simply moves the work to someone else.