Take Control of Your AI with Agent Instructions

Every organization has its own voice. Some prefer formal, buttoned-up responses for regulatory communications. Others want warm, conversational language for customer-facing messages. Until now, the only way to influence Lightspeed's output style was to carefully craft your knowledge base entries to model the tone you wanted.

Agent Instructions gives you direct control. A new freeform text field lets you write custom instructions that the AI follows when generating responses. And for the most common adjustments, quick chips let you apply changes with a single click.

What's included

• Freeform instructions field — Write natural-language instructions that tell the AI how to behave. Examples: "Always end with a friendly closing," "Keep responses under three sentences," or "Use formal language suitable for regulatory correspondence"
• Quick instruction chips — Pre-built one-click buttons for the most common adjustments: tone (formal, friendly, empathetic), length (concise, detailed), format (bullet points, paragraphs), and more
• Persistent settings — Your instructions persist across sessions, so you set them once and they apply to every response until you change them
• Stackable modifiers — Combine multiple quick chips with custom instructions. Use a chip for "friendly tone" and add a custom instruction for "always mention our return policy" — both apply simultaneously

How it works

The Agent Instructions field appears in the response generator interface, right above the generate button. Type any instruction in natural language, or click one or more quick chips to apply common modifiers. When you generate a response, these instructions are included alongside your knowledge base context and the customer query.

Instructions are organization-wide by default, meaning every team member benefits from the same configured behavior. Individual users can add additional instructions that stack on top of the organization defaults.

What's next

We're building instruction templates that can be saved and shared across teams, along with the ability to create custom quick chips tailored to your organization's most common needs.