Agentic Flows lets SmartSite Assistant choose a specialist for the visitor’s current need, give that specialist only the relevant instructions and capabilities, and move the conversation when the need changes. The feature is powerful when your customer journey has genuinely different jobs. It is unnecessary when one well-written Assistant can already do the work.
Advanced is not automatically better. A larger flow introduces more instructions, more routing decisions, more testing, and more ways to create overlapping responsibilities. The reward is stronger separation of duties: a booking specialist can collect appointment details, a returns specialist can follow a returns policy, and a de-escalation specialist can slow down an emotionally difficult exchange.
Best for general website questions, modest knowledge bases, a few tools, and sites where most conversations follow the same rules.
Best when visitor goals need meaningfully different instructions, tools, risk controls, or conversational styles.
| Situation | Usually the better fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| A brochure site answers opening-hours, service, and contact questions | Basic Assistant | Those requests share the same knowledge and conversational rules. Splitting them into agents adds little value. |
| A clinic handles general information, appointment intake, billing questions, and distressed visitors | Advanced Agents | The jobs have different boundaries, tools, tones, and escalation needs. |
| A shop has one order-status lookup tool and otherwise answers product FAQs | Start with Basic | One Assistant can call a well-described tool. Add specialists only if support and sales behavior genuinely diverge. |
| A membership organization serves several departments with distinct policies and forms | Advanced Agents | Separate scopes can reduce instruction conflicts and attach each capability to its responsible specialist. |
| The team has not defined ownership, success criteria, or safe action rules | Basic for now | Agentic routing cannot repair an unclear business process. Design the process first. |
Your normal selected Assistant. It handles greetings, broad website questions, and general knowledge. It is also the safe place to return when no specialist clearly owns the request.
A focused role with its own description, instructions, model settings, knowledge access, and assigned tools. Visitors should experience a seamless answer—not an announcement about internal agents.
A capability, such as looking up information, sending an email, or calling a webhook. A tool is not a specialist. It does one defined thing on behalf of the specialist that owns it.
An explicit permission and rule for moving from one conversational owner to another. It defines where the conversation may go and the visitor intent that justifies the move.
The visitor does not select an agent from a menu. SmartSite considers the newest message, current conversational owner, specialist scopes, explicit handoff conditions, and the workflow routing policy. It then starts or continues the appropriate owner. When an agent needs a capability, the model may request an enabled tool assigned to that agent. Protected actions pause for confirmation before execution.
This follows the established agent-design idea of combining a model, instructions, and tools, then using orchestration to assign work among specialists. OpenAI’s general Agents overview describes the same high-level building blocks. SmartSite implements its own WordPress workflow runtime using a PHP agent package; it does not embed the official OpenAI Agents SDK. The reference is included to explain the wider concept, not to claim the products are identical.
Find the switch at AI Website Chat → API Settings → Advanced Agents.
When Enable Advanced Agents runtime is off:
When the switch is on:
A well-designed flow is invisible. The visitor receives one continuous conversation in their language. They should not be told “I am transferring you to the Billing Agent,” see an internal agent key, or need to repeat details that were already collected. The internal team structure exists to improve the answer—not to make the chat feel like a telephone switchboard.
Consider this appointment conversation:
VisitorI need to move my appointment from Tuesday.
Appointments specialistOf course. What name and contact detail was the appointment booked under, and which day would suit you instead?
VisitorBefore that—will I lose my deposit?
Appointments specialistThe answer should come from the published cancellation policy or the appropriate billing scope, not from a guess.
The good experience is not “more agents.” It is correct ownership, remembered context, grounded facts, and an explicit pause before any real-world action.
Use Agentic Flows for bounded business journeys such as:
Do not use Agentic Flows as a substitute for:
This section is deliberately a handbook rather than a repeated settings-page template:
These sources describe OpenAI’s platform and SDK concepts. For exact SmartSite behavior and controls, use this handbook and the current plugin interface.
