Building Your First AI Agent: A Step-by-Step Guide with Agents.do

The conversation around AI is shifting. We're moving beyond simple chatbots and into the realm of true autonomous agents—AI-powered programs that can reason, plan, and execute complex tasks independently. For developers, this represents a new frontier: the ability to build and deploy an entire digital workforce. But how do you go from concept to a functioning AI employee?

Enter Agents.do, the enterprise-grade platform designed for building and orchestrating this new AI-powered workforce. In this guide, we'll walk you through the fundamentals of agentic workflows and show you how to build your very first digital worker using the developer-first toolkit from Agents.do.

What Exactly is an Autonomous Agent?

Before we dive into the code, let's clarify what we're building. An autonomous agent, or digital worker, is an AI-powered software program designed to understand objectives, perform complex tasks, make decisions, and operate independently to achieve specific business goals.

Think of it not as a script that follows a rigid path, but as a digital teammate you can delegate objectives to. You define the what and the why; the agent, orchestrated by the Agents.do platform, handles the how.

Building Your First Digital Worker: Meet Amy

The best way to understand the power of Agents.do is to build an agent. Let's create "Amy," a customer support agent whose objective is to handle customer inquiries and resolve common issues.

With Agents.do, you can define an entire agent using a simple, declarative structure. This is "Business-as-Code" in action.

Here is the complete definition for Amy:

import { Agent } from 'agents.do'

// Create a customer support agent
const customerSupportAgent = Agent({
  name: 'Amy',
  role: 'Customer Support Agent',
  objective: 'Handles customer inquiries and resolves common issues',
  keyResults: ['responseTime', 'resolutionTime', 'escalationRate', 'customerSatisfaction'],
  url: 'https://amy.do',
  integrations: ['chat', 'slack', 'email', 'zendesk', 'shopify'],
  triggers: ['onTicketCreated', 'onMessageReceived'],
  searches: ['FAQs', 'Tickets', 'Orders', 'Products', 'Customers'],
  actions: ['sendMessage', 'updateOrder', 'refundOrder', 'resolveTicket', 'escalateTicket'],
})

This compact block of code defines a powerful agent capable of significant business automation. Let’s break it down parameter by parameter.

1. Defining Identity and Purpose

  name: 'Amy',
  role: 'Customer Support Agent',
  objective: 'Handles customer inquiries and resolves common issues',

This is the agent's core identity.

• name: A simple, human-readable identifier.
• role: Describes its function within your organization.
• objective: This is the most critical parameter. It's the high-level goal you assign to the agent. Amy's objective isn't just to "answer emails" but to actively "resolve common issues," giving her the autonomy to achieve that outcome.

2. Measuring Success

  keyResults: ['responseTime', 'resolutionTime', 'escalationRate', 'customerSatisfaction'],

How do you know if your digital worker is performing well? The keyResults array connects the agent's performance to concrete business metrics. The Agents.do platform can track these KPIs, giving you a clear view of your agent's effectiveness and ROI.

3. Giving Your Agent the Right Tools

  integrations: ['chat', 'slack', 'email', 'zendesk', 'shopify'],
  searches: ['FAQs', 'Tickets', 'Orders', 'Products', 'Customers'],

An agent is only as good as the tools and information it can access.

• integrations: This defines the systems Amy can connect to. Here, she has access to communication channels (chat, slack, email) and core business platforms like Zendesk and Shopify.
• searches: This specifies the knowledge bases Amy can query to find answers. She can look through your FAQs, existing tickets, customer orders, and more to gather context before acting.

4. Defining Triggers and Capabilities

  triggers: ['onTicketCreated', 'onMessageReceived'],
  actions: ['sendMessage', 'updateOrder', 'refundOrder', 'resolveTicket', 'escalateTicket'],

This is where the agent becomes truly autonomous.

• triggers: These are the events that activate Amy. She'll spring into action whenever a new ticket is created in Zendesk or a new message is received in a connected chat.
• actions: This is the palette of capabilities Amy can use to achieve her objective. Based on an inquiry, she can decide whether to sendMessage with an answer from the FAQs, refundOrder via the Shopify integration, or escalateTicket to a human teammate if the problem is too complex.

From a Single Agent to an Autonomous Workforce

Building one agent is powerful, but the true potential of AI agents is realized when they collaborate. A core feature of the Agents.do platform is enabling agent-to-agent collaboration.

Imagine a customer messages Amy asking, "Where is my order, and can you change the shipping address?"

1. Amy (Support Agent) receives the message (onMessageReceived trigger).
2. She searches the Orders database to find the order status.
3. She recognizes the request to "change the shipping address" is outside her primary scope.
4. Amy delegates the task to a specialized "Logistics Agent" whose objective is to manage shipping and fulfillment.
5. The Logistics Agent performs the updateShippingAddress action and confirms completion back to Amy.
6. Amy then messages the customer with the order status and confirmation that the address has been updated.

This is a true agentic workflow. You can build teams of specialized agents that delegate tasks and share information to accomplish complex, multi-step business processes, all orchestrated by the Agents.do platform.

Get Started with Business-as-Code

Agents.do empowers developers to treat business processes like software. By using simple SDKs and APIs, you can define, deploy, manage, and scale a reliable workforce of autonomous agents that deliver valuable Services-as-Software.

You are no longer just writing code; you are architecting an autonomous workforce.

Ready to orchestrate your first team of digital workers?

Visit Agents.do today to explore the documentation and start building the future of business automation.