Deploy custom source-backed AIP Assist Agents

Serving custom content sources with AIP Assist dramatically expands the application assistance available to users. This feature also integrates with AIP Agent Studio, allowing users to set up dedicated LLM-powered assistants called AIP Assist Agents, which use custom content sources as their only search context. Developers can now create custom-made assistants that only draw information from custom sources, without coding or LLM expertise.

As a sample use case, imagine developers are building an application that needs to be rolled out to hundreds or thousands of users. With the integration of AIP Agent Studio and AIP Assist, developers can now quickly configure and ship custom LLM-powered assistants, or AIP Agents, to provide immediate, interactive support based on custom content sources.

AIP Agents and Agent Studio

To understand this feature, familiarize yourself with the concept of an AIP Agent and the AIP Agent Studio application:

AIP Agents: Interactive, LLM-powered assistants equipped with enterprise-specific information and tools.

AIP Agent Studio: Allows users to build no-code AIP Agents and deploy them internally in the Palantir platform and soon, externally with our OSDK.

Create content and register custom sources

The first step to creating custom source-backed AIP Agents is getting your custom content onto the Palantir platform. There are currently two methods of adding custom content sources that can be registered with AIP Assist:

1. (Recommended) Notepad documents
2. In-platform custom documentation (Markdown files in a documentation type repository in Code Repositories).

For this tutorial, we will explore the first option. For more information on this functionality refer to register content sources with AIP Assist.

1. In Notepad, create a new document by selecting + New document. Write or paste your content and give your document a title and a brief description of its contents. In the example below, we added information about our example application - the Inventory Management Application.

2. Make sure to organize your content into headings and subsections. Having a heading structure significantly improves the accuracy of responses, as content is segmented based on headings. Refer to the custom content source best practices for more information.

3. Register your content with AIP Assist. You can do this by selecting Actions > Add to AIP Assist. Note that it may take some time for this to appear as the document becomes discoverable to AIP Assist.

4. Give your document a title and description briefly explaining the contents of the document, and save. AIP Assist and AIP Agents will now be aware of this document.

Note: This will not affect the behavior of AIP Assist or AIP Agents in any way. This just makes content available to AIP Assist. You still need to build and deploy an AIP Assist Agent that leverages it.

Create an AIP Assist Agent with Agent Studio

1. Navigate to the AIP Agent Studio application and select + New AIP Agent. As there are multiple types of AIP Agents, be sure to select an AIP Assist Agent.

2. You will be presented with a setup wizard to assist with AIP Agent creation. Start by giving your agent a name and a description. A description is required to save the agent. This will show up for users when discovering and using your agent, so make sure to make it descriptive. You may also provide an icon for your agent to help with discovery:

Note: AIP Agents are Palantir filesystem resources. They will be permissioned down to the filesystem location where they are saved. Users will only be able to access your agent if they have read access to the location where it is saved and access to the custom content source backing it.

3. Next, for Retrieval context select Custom documentation and choose your previously indexed document. If it is not appearing in the list, go back to step one and ensure that you added it to AIP Assist. You can choose many different documents to serve as the search context for your AIP Assist Agent.

4. Choose which model you want the agent to use. Users of your agent should have access to this model. If they do not, this setting will fall back to the model AIP Assist is configured to use as your environment default. Refer to the How to structure a system prompt dropdown for guidance on writing your system prompt.

5. After configuring model information, review the Summary page and select Create AIP Agent.

6. Finally, you must publish your AIP Assist Agent. Select the the blue checkmark icon at the top right to publish. This will publish the first version of your agent (1.0). Any changes you make from here will require you to publish a new version for them to take effect.

Interact with your new AIP Assist Agent

Now that you have created an AIP Assist Agent and provided it with access to your Notepad content, you are ready to start interacting with it in AIP Assist.

1. Start a new conversation in AIP Assist. You should see your new agent available in the AIP Assist Modes selector.

2. Select your agent and fire off your first question!

Note: Many of the features from AIP Assist, like citations, work seamlessly with your AIP Assist Agent and custom content source. In this case, the citation will refer to the associated Notepad document. If you have more than one document, your agent will cite the correct one depending on the context.