What information should I give my AI agent, and should I load my whole website into its knowledge base?
Think of the agent as a new receptionist you just hired. It only knows what you give it, and it will not be perfect on day one.
The AI models were trained on practically the whole internet, so the agent already knows general and industry knowledge (for example the difference between granite and linoleum for a flooring company, or what kind of shingles to recommend) and how to sell. You do not need to upload sales training, sales frameworks or industry guides. If the agent is selling, just tell it which sales framework to use.
What it does not know is your business. Give it the specifics: business name, phone number, website, address, business hours, how long you have been in business, who the owner is, your services, products and prices, your refund or return policy and any preferences. The amount of information needed is normally small.
The best way to give it these facts is as FAQs in the agent, at the bottom of the prompt. The AI learns by example, and FAQs are easy to maintain. To control exactly what it says, type the question and the answer you want, for example the question "What type of shingles do you recommend?" with the exact answer you want it to give. There is no special format: you can write prices in any format, or even copy all the text from a web page and paste it into the prompt and the AI will figure it out.
Keep improving it as you go. Feed it as much as you can up front, and every time a customer asks something it could not answer (for example what year you were founded), add the answer as a new FAQ. The agent gets smarter about your business over time.
Also tell it what to do when it does not know an answer, in plain sentences as you would tell an employee: for example to say it does not know, to steer the conversation back to what it does know, or to collect the caller's information and say someone from the team will reach out. The instructions in the prompt are the entirety of what the agent is told.
Agents also have built-in knowledge bases. Click create, give the knowledge base a name, and add your own files and websites. You can also keep documents in the file library and attach client-specific files to a contact.
We do not recommend loading a client's whole website. Most website content is general articles written for search engines, which the AI already knows, and if the agent gives an answer you do not like you would have to hunt through hundreds of pages to find where it came from. With FAQs you know exactly where an answer came from and can search the prompt and fix it quickly. If you do load a lot of material, have the AI write FAQs or a list of pure facts about the business from it.
A knowledge base is the right choice when there is a lot of data, for example a car dealership with a thousand cars or a list of 14,000 products, because you do not want a prompt that long. A real-time API call can also fit that case. Where the information lives does not make the AI faster or slower; the choice is about how easy it is to maintain.