AI Operations · Glossary
Tool
Component 7 of the Eight Components of an Interactive Agent. A Tool is the authored interface to an external system, classified by consequentiality and governed by authored Tool Gating conditions.
Tools are how Interactive Agents act on the world outside the conversation. A Tool wraps an external API, internal system, database, or service in an authored interface: input schema, output schema, side-effect class, and gating conditions. Tools are classified by consequentiality. A read-only Tool returns data without external effect. A Consequential Tool produces an external effect: a payment, a transaction, a notification, a record write. Consequential Tools are governed differently: tighter Tool Gating, deterministic policy enforcement on the invocation conditions, mandatory production-trace logging of every call. The InteractiveAI Platform's Tool component standardises the contract between the Interactive Agent and the external surface.