Quickstart

A working agent on your team’s Slack in 10 minutes. No code, no setup.

1. Create the agent

From the Agents page (left nav) click the + Create agent card and you land on the Templates page.

The template catalog carries a few dozen ready-made agents across categories like marketing, sales, support and engineering. Describe what you need at the top and the catalog narrows to what fits, or take one of the quick starts.

Describe what you need at the top of the Templates page, or pick one of the quick starts

Or browse the catalogue yourself, filtered by category. To start with nothing attached, take Start from scratch on the Empty Agent card.

The template catalog, filtered by category, with the Empty Agent card first

Fill in:

Field	What to put
Agent name	e.g. Acme Support Bot
What does this agent do?	one or two sentences — this shapes the persona and shows on the overview page
URL slug	auto-generated from the name. Becomes acme-support-bot.cloud.surogate.ai. Locked after creation.
Model	leave as Surogate (the platform default)

Click CREATE AGENT. The agent provisions in ~30 seconds; status flips from deploying to running.

The new-agent form: agent name, what it does, an auto-generated URL slug and the model picker

You land on the agent’s Overview page with its public URL, stats, channels, and recent sessions.

The agent's Overview page: knowledge, skills, tools, channels and model, each with its next step

2. Have your first conversation

On the agent’s Overview page, click New chat in the left navigation (between Publish and Inbox).

The chat opens. Type a question, press Enter — the agent streams its response. Tool calls (KB searches, web fetches) appear inline so you can see what it did.

A chat thread: the question, the tool calls the agent made, and its answer

Templates ship without your team’s content, so the agent doesn’t know your product yet. Step 4 fixes that.

3. Publish to Slack

Click Publish in the left nav, then open the Channels tab. Find Slack under Add a channel and click Connect. A guided wizard walks you through it.

The Channels tab with Web and Slack live, and Telegram, WhatsApp and Website ready to connect

The wizard asks for your Slack credentials:

• App ID and Signing Secret: from your Slack app’s Basic Information
• Bot Token — xoxb-… from OAuth & Permissions

Don’t have a Slack app yet? The Slack page walks through creating one, its scopes and the Request URLs.

Finish the wizard and Slack moves to the Live list within a few seconds. DM the bot or @mention it in a channel.

4. Make it smarter (optional but worth it)

Two quick wins, both on the Configure page:

Add a knowledge base

In the left nav under LIBRARY, click Knowledge Bases → NEW KNOWLEDGE BASE. Name it (e.g. acme-product) and pick its language. Add a few .md or .pdf sources, click Build, wait for status active.

Back on the agent’s Configure page → Knowledge Bases tab → + ATTACH KNOWLEDGE BASE → pick the new KB.

The agent will now search the KB at runtime when a question matches its content.

Tighten the persona

The agent’s identity, tone, and rules live on Configure → Identity tab — the DESCRIPTION field for short summaries and a SOUL.md textarea (up to 20,000 characters) for the full persona block. Replace the default with something like:

markdown

# Acme Support Agent

You are the Acme support assistant. Speak as "we" when referring to Acme.
Tone: warm, concise, technically literate. Avoid corporate boilerplate.

When you don't know something, say "I'll get a human on this" rather
than guessing.

Save. New chats pick up the new persona; in-progress sessions keep the old one (by design).

The Identity tab: basic info, the SOUL.md editor, and the unsaved-changes bar

5. Watch what it does

Every chat is a session. Open Sessions in the left nav → pick a session.

For each session, hover assistant turns and click 👍 or 👎. This is the signal you use to improve the agent over time — see Improve your agent.

The Sessions list, filtered by quality flags, showing one session marked Positive

Getting started checklist

The Getting started row in the left nav, under Sessions, opens a checklist that follows this walkthrough. It opens on its own the first time you reach Work mode. The steps are:

1. Account created, already done.
2. Create your first agent.
3. Add your knowledge.
4. Talk to your agent, done when the agent replies.

Once those are done, four optional steps unlock: Edit capabilities, Attach a skill, Attach a tool and Connect a channel. Each step has a button that takes you to the right screen.

• The checklist only counts what you do while following it, so an agent you made earlier doesn’t tick a step.
• Progress is kept in your browser.
• Close the panel with the X at any time. The row stays in the nav, shows how many steps are done, and turns to Onboarding complete at the end.
• Skip onboarding in the guide’s coach bubbles turns off the onboarding everywhere, including the Develop tutorial. You can pick it up again from this row.
• Develop mode has its own checklist: import a dataset, train a model, serve it, evaluate the training and test it in the playground.

What you’ve done in 10 minutes

• A live agent on a public URL: <your-slug>.cloud.surogate.ai
• Available in Slack to your team
• Grounded in your product docs (via the KB)
• With your tone (via the persona)
• Recording every conversation for review and improvement

That’s enough to start using it for real work. Come back to Run an agent and Improve your agent when you want to go deeper.

To let the agent work on files of your own computer, install Surogate Desktop.