Overview
Bolt Agents are AI-powered teammates designed to support students through automated and personalized engagement. Whether you’re deploying your first agent or expanding your digital workforce, the onboarding process helps ensure each agent is set up with the right role, skills, and permissions.
You can onboard and manage Bolt Agents in two places:
Engagement > Bolt Agents – for full setup, preview, and management.
Engagement > Conversations > Settings > Bolt Agents – for quick access while managing conversation tools and channels.
This guide walks you through how to onboard (i.e., create) a new Bolt Agent. You'll learn how to choose from pre-built agent templates, customize their skills, configure permissions, and more.
Step-by-Step: How to Onboard a New Bolt Agent
Navigate to the Bolt Agents Page
From the top menu, go to Engagement > Bolt Agents.
On the Bolt Agents page, click + Onboard Agent in the top-right corner.
Name Your Agent
At the top of the onboarding side panel, enter the name of your agent. This name is what users will see, so choose something friendly and relatable.
💡 Tip: Avoid using departmental titles like "Admissions" or "Financial Aid" as names. Instead, choose natural, human-like names (e.g., Juno, Finley, Kai) to enhance student engagement.
Select an Agent Type
In the Type tab, select a pre-built Agent Type such as Academic Advisor or Financial Aid Advisor.
These types act as templates with built-in skills and backend prompts to guide the agent’s expertise. Agents are designed to be specialized, giving you the flexibility to customize their expertise for specific functional or subject areas. This allows you to deploy them in different contexts where they can be experts in their roles.
💬 Prefer AI assistance? Click "Create with Bolt Agent Creator" to describe the agent you want in plain language and let our AI walk you through setup.
Configure Agent Settings
Use the Information, Permissions, and Knowledge tabs to customize your agent.
These settings define what the agent can do, how it appears, and what knowledge it draws from.
Preview and Confirm Your Agent
Click Preview in the top-right to see how your agent will behave.
When you're ready, click Confirm to complete onboarding.
Agent Types + Settings: Explained
Bolt Agents are highly customizable, but to make onboarding efficient, we’ve designed a streamlined flow with helpful defaults. This section breaks down the Agent Type you choose at the start and the settings you’ll configure across tabs to tailor your agent’s behavior, access, and knowledge.
Agent Types
Agent Types are pre-configured templates designed to help you onboard faster and smarter. Each type provides your agent with:
A pre-selected set of relevant skills
Backend system prompts that shape how the agent thinks and communicates
A starting identity and area of expertise (e.g., Financial Aid, Academics)
These built-in instructions guide the agent’s tone, reasoning, and ability to answer questions in context, similar to how a job description sets expectations for a new hire.
Important: You’re never locked in. Any Agent Type can be modified, expanded, or repurposed to meet your institution’s needs.
Agent Types Options
Agent Types Options
Academic Advisor: Supports current students throughout their academic journey, detecting when they may need help and guiding them through key processes like course registration.
Career Advisor: Drives inquiries, boosts application starts, and fills recruiting events.
Financial Aid Advisor: Helps prospective and current students understand financial aid and tuition at the university, surfacing key deadlines and providing support with any money-related questions.
Common App Advisor: Monitors student progress, identifies risks, and connects them to support resources.
Athletics Counselor: Supports student-athletes before and after enrollment by providing clear information on the school’s athletics programs and facilitating direct staff support.
Admission Advisor: Drives completed applications by engaging with students proactively and helping them through the process.
Campus Life Advisor: Promotes student engagement and mental health by supporting students with key on-campus logistics like housing and scheduling, staying in close contact with students, and inviting them to participate in campus life.
Peer Advisor: Supports students with academic and personal challenges, connecting them with resources and helping them navigate the university community.
Alumni Relations Officer: Helps students decide their academic path based on their career plans, facilitating event attendance and staff engagement to support the student.
Agent Settings
Once you choose an Agent Type, you’ll configure the agent through three main tabs: Information, Permissions, and Knowledge. These settings shape everything from how the agent introduces itself to what content it can access.
Each tab allows for deep customization, enabling you to fine-tune the agent to suit specific audiences, topics, or use cases.
🧠 Think of it this way:
Agent Type = the agent’s identity
Settings tabs = the agent’s capabilities and boundaries
Settings: Information Tab
Settings: Information Tab
The Information tab helps personalize how your agent looks and communicates with users.
Enabled: Use the toggle to activate the agent.
Agent Title (Optional): Personalize your agent's title to make it unique. This title will appear in Messenger and your conversation inbox.
If no title is added, the Agent Type will be displayed by default. For example, in the image below, we’ve set the title as “Blaze Ambassador.”
Select Agent Skills: Agents not only provide answers but also help students accomplish tasks. Here you can choose what your agent can do (e.g., schedule appointments, provide application status). For a complete list of skills and their descriptions, visit our AI Agent Skills article.
Avatar: Personalize the agent's appearance by adding a unique avatar or picture. You can either upload an image or use the built-in AI-powered avatar generator to create one.
For the best results, upload an image with a 1:1 aspect ratio (square), such as 100px by 100px.
If no image is uploaded, the agent will default to displaying your institution’s primary logo.
Greeting: Write a friendly message that introduces the agent to users.
This message is the first thing students will see when they start a new chat with the agent after selecting it from the list.
A personalized, friendly greeting helps set the tone and guide students in starting their conversation.
For example: “Hi! I’m Finley and can help you with most things related to financial aid. How can I help?”
Voice (Optional): Assign a voice if you're using voice-based features. Adding a voice ensures the agent can interact more naturally in supported channels.
Element451 offers two voice-based features that work seamlessly with Bolt Agents. Below is a breakdown of each feature, including how this setting impacts it, and links to more detailed information.
Voice-Recorded Messages (Supported in Messenger)
If no voice is assigned:
The agent's voice reply feature will be disabled, even if voice replies are enabled in the Agent Messenger settings.
External participants (e.g., students) can still send recorded messages, and the agent will understand them, but it will reply via text only.
If a voice is assigned:
The agent will reply via voice recordings when spoken to using voice recordings.
[Beta] Advanced Voice Mode (Supported in Messenger + In-App Calling)
If no voice is assigned:
Advanced Voice Mode will be disabled for that agent.
If a voice is assigned:
The agent can communicate live in real-time voice conversations, similar to a human-to-human phone call.
When assigning a voice, ensure it is compatible with Advanced Voice Mode. Voices are clearly labeled to indicate compatibility, helping you make the right choice.
Description: A short description visible when students are prompted to select an agent. Tip: Keep it concise yet descriptive, ensuring students can quickly determine what the agent can help with. A clear and focused description makes it easier for students to select the right agent for their needs.
Internal Description (Optional): A behind-the-scenes note to help with agent handoffs. Use keywords or phrases to summarize the agent's capabilities and skills. These descriptions are visible only to other agents, helping them determine when an agent-to-agent handoff is appropriate, but they are not shown to users.
Settings: Permissions Tab
Settings: Permissions Tab
The Permissions tab defines what the agent is allowed to access and act on, and it’s directly tied to the skills you selected in the Information tab.
🧠 Think of it this way:
Skills = what the agent can do
Permissions = what the agent is allowed to access/act on within that skill
For example, if the agent has the skill Schedule Appointments, permissions determine whether they can book any availability or only specific ones.
This scoping is especially helpful when tailoring agents to specific departments or use cases, like giving a Financial Aid Advisor access only to financial aid-related applications and events.
These settings align with the skills you’ve enabled and include:
Register for Event
Individual Events: Allow access to individual events ad-hoc.
Categories: Allow access to each of these categories of events.
Start an Application / Get Application Status
Individual Applications: Allow access to individual applications ad-hoc.
Schedule Appointments
Individual Availabilities: Allow access to individual availabilities ad-hoc.
Categories: Allow access to each of these categories of appointments.
User Data Access
Search and select the individual custom fields you want the agent to have access to.
By default, permissions are set to “all” to grant broad access. To customize, toggle off “all,” and additional configuration options will appear.
How Permissions Work:
Permissions appear dynamically based on which skills are enabled.
By default, permissions are set to “All” for full access.
You can toggle off “All” to specify access to individual items or categories (e.g., event types, appointment availabilities, custom fields).
Settings: Knowledge Tab
Settings: Knowledge Tab
The Knowledge tab controls what information the agent can reference when responding to users.
By default, the “All Knowledge” toggle is enabled, giving the agent comprehensive access to everything in your public Knowledge Hub. This is a great option for agents meant to handle a wide range of inquiries.
However, if you toggle “All Knowledge” off, a Knowledge Settings section will appear, allowing you to scope access more precisely using the following options:
Individual Sources: Select specific sources manually.
Categories: Grant access to predefined groups of knowledge (e.g., Financial Aid, Housing).
URL Patterns: Allow access to any content that matches certain web address patterns.
Title Patterns: Restrict access to content that includes specific keywords or phrases in the title.
You can use one or more of these filters together to fine-tune your agent’s access.
This flexibility helps ensure each agent draws from the most relevant and accurate content, whether you’re building a focused specialist or setting guardrails around specific information.
Next Steps
What happens next depends on how you plan to use the agent:
Bolt Jobs
Once created, your agent is fully functional and can begin working internally on Bolt Jobs. Assign tasks that let the agent reason, take action, and optionally collaborate with a human in the loop. Learn more about Bolt Jobs ->
Manage Inbound Conversations
To make the agent available to students through conversation channels like Messenger, Email, or SMS, you must assign it to a team. Bolt Agents won’t appear in any student-facing channel unless they are part of a Team. Teams determine when, where, and how agents engage with students based on configured conditions.
To deploy your agent externally, follow our Managing Bolt Agent Teams guide.
FAQ
How are Bolt Agents in Conversations different from Bolt Agents in Bolt Jobs?
How are Bolt Agents in Conversations different from Bolt Agents in Bolt Jobs?
They’re the same agents—just working in different contexts. Bolt Agents can be assigned to Bolt Jobs to autonomously pursue goals like getting a student to start an application, using reasoning and optional human collaboration.
They can also be deployed in Conversations to handle inbound messages, guiding students 24/7 across channels like Messenger, Email, and SMS.
One agent, multiple ways to help—whether proactively working behind the scenes or responding directly to student inquiries.