Built-in and Outcome Agents
FunnelStory builds two kinds of agents for you. Built-in agents do one job — investigate a needle mover and draft the right response, for example. Outcome Agents work toward a goal you set, such as protecting renewals for a product. Where AI Agents are graphs you configure to automate whatever your team needs, these are built by FunnelStory around a specific job or goal and tuned for it. You never build its reasoning or steps; at most you turn on a setting or fill in a short configuration that tells it what to focus on.
The shape: read evidence, reason, act
Every agent FunnelStory builds follows the same shape. It's grounded in real evidence pulled live from your workspace — conversations, relationship history, commercial terms, prediction data — not a generic prompt. It reasons through a tool-calling loop rather than a single LLM call, so it can pull more evidence mid-investigation if the first pass isn't enough. And it ends by either taking an action directly or producing something a person reviews before acting on it.
That shape is what turns a two-step manual habit — notice a problem, then go dig into it yourself — into one: detect → investigate → act, with the middle step no longer resting entirely on a person's time.
Two modes of the same agent
A built-in agent can run two ways, and both draw on the exact same underlying agent — same tools, same reasoning, same bar for what a good output looks like. They differ only in what triggers them and what happens with the result:
- Assist mode — a person asks for it, on demand, inside the relevant workflow. The agent's reasoning streams live, and a person is present to review what it decides to do.
- Auto mode — the agent runs unattended, triggered automatically as the relevant event occurs, with no one asking for it and no one watching it run.
Both modes matter for different reasons. Assist mode gives a person a faster way to do work they were already going to do. Auto mode means the work sometimes gets done before anyone thought to ask — the loop can close itself.
The first example: investigating a Needle Mover
The first built-in agent FunnelStory shipped investigates Needle Movers — the leading indicators of churn or expansion risk FunnelStory surfaces from your conversations, product usage, and support data.
- In Assist mode, it's the Investigation and Triage chat on a needle mover's detail view — ask it to look into the signal, and it can draft a follow-up Action Card, outreach email included, directly in the conversation.
- In Auto mode, it's autosuggested action cards — turned on per workspace, it investigates open needle movers on a schedule and drafts a card before anyone opens them, with no agent configuration required.
Both modes read the same account evidence, apply the same judgment for what makes a good recommendation, and land in the same place: an Action Card ready for a CSM to act on.
Outcome Agents
Outcome Agents are configured on the Outcome Agents page rather than through a setting. A Feature Adoption agent, for example, starts as a draft where you choose what it should focus on; FunnelStory then generates outcome cohorts from your past renewals, and the agent goes live only on the cohorts you activate. The Needle Mover agent above is still turned on with a workspace setting. The Outcome Agents page is enabled per workspace by FunnelStory; see Outcome Agents for how to configure, activate, and track these agents.
How this differs from AI Agents
FunnelStory uses "agent" for things you build and things FunnelStory builds, and it's worth keeping them apart:
| AI Agents (flow builder) | Built-in and Outcome Agents | |
|---|---|---|
| Who builds it | You — on a canvas, in JSON, or via Vibe Coding | FunnelStory's engineering team |
| Scope | Whatever your workspace configures it to do | One specific job, built for that job |
| Where it shows up | Wherever you wire a trigger to point it | Built into the specific feature it serves |
| Setup | Author a trigger, steps, and functions | No steps to author — turn on a setting, or configure and activate it on the Outcome Agents page |
They're related, not competing: a built-in or Outcome Agent is what a specific, high-value workflow looks like once FunnelStory has built and hardened it for you, rather than left for you to assemble yourself in the flow builder.
Related
- Needle Movers — the signal this first agent investigates
- Action Cards — where its output lands
- Managing Needle Movers — turning on autosuggested action cards
- AI Summaries — the Investigation and Triage chat
- Outcome Agents — configuring and activating cohort agents
- Built-in agents — every built-in agent and how to turn it on
- AI Agents — the general-purpose flow builder, for comparison