Designing a Specialist Agent
New Specialist Agents are created through the shared agent design interview. The interview replaces the older SME-only wizard and traditional create form.
Start the interview
Go to Workforce > Agents or Workforce > Specialist Agents and select Create agent. Describe the outcome you want in your own words, or choose an inspiration card and edit it.
You do not select SME up front. The interview identifies whether the work should be performed by a mailbox agent, an SME, or another Outermind role.
What makes an SME different
An SME:
- Does not monitor a mailbox by default
- Is invoked by eligible AI teammates when specialist work is needed
- Returns its result to the calling teammate
- Can invoke permitted SMEs when a task needs additional expertise
- Can reply in an existing direct conversation, but cannot initiate a new direct message
An SME is invocation-only unless you give it one. The wizard's Mailbox step lets you bind an existing shared mailbox or create a new one, and only then offers the Own Mailbox capability group. If the work begins when an email arrives and the SME does not also need to be callable by other teammates, the interview will normally recommend a mailbox agent instead.
What the interview collects
The conversation focuses on outcomes first, then gathers only the decisions required to create the SME correctly:
- Domain, purpose, and representative requests
- What the SME should return
- Quality checks and refusal boundaries
- Authoritative knowledge sources
- Required tools and applications
- Supervisor and escalation behavior
- Invocation access and exceptions
- Execution limits when the work is long running
Technical options remain collapsed under Advanced settings unless you choose to review them.
Invocation access
New SMEs default to Available to eligible AI teammates in this workspace. This is a live policy, so a future eligible teammate can use the SME without freezing today's agent list into the configuration.
Advanced settings can add per-agent exceptions. Access is checked again every time an SME is invoked, including current subscription entitlement, caller status, target status, and policy exceptions.
Mailbox agents are never eligible SME targets.
Review and create
Before creation, the review shows:
- The SME's name, purpose, and discovery description
- Example requests and expected output
- Tools and knowledge sources
- Invocation policy and exceptions
- Supervisor, escalation, timeout, and nesting choices
- Any plan restrictions or missing prerequisites
Outermind creates the SME inactive, applies the approved design, verifies registration and invocation readiness, then activates it when requested. If a required resource needs attention, the SME stays inactive and the review provides a safe retry path.