What is a product agent?
A product agent is an AI agent that learns your product by using it. It gets a normal user account, opens the app, and learns every workflow: which screens exist, what each button is labeled, how you get from one place to the next, and what happens when you do. It keeps using the product as it changes, so what it knows stays current. It does all of that without reading a line of your source code.
What a product agent knows
Everything a user could find by clicking around. Which screens exist, what each button and field is labeled, how you get from one place to the next, and what happens when you do. Because it learns from the running product rather than from the code or the docs, it also knows the things nobody wrote down, like the settings page that moved last week or the button that stays disabled until you connect an integration.
What it knows stays current because it keeps using the product. When a release moves something, the next time the agent goes through that workflow it sees the new layout and updates what it knows. Nobody has to tell it.
What a product agent can't see
Source code, feature flags, unlaunched screens, internal names. If a logged-in user can't see it, the agent doesn't know it exists, which is what makes it safe to point at a public help center. An agent that reads the codebase tends to over-share, and it needs access most security teams won't grant to a help tool. A product agent needs a user account.
Where it's used
Frigade's in-product assistant is a product agent. It answers questions about the product from what it learned by using it, and takes the action when the question is a task. How Frigade works covers the learning process.
The same agent can keep a knowledge base up to date. After every release it runs through the steps in each article inside the live product, finds the ones that no longer match what's on screen, and drafts the rewrite. How to keep a knowledge base up to date when the product changes every day is the long version, and Frigade Knowledge is the product that does it.
Common questions
- How is a product agent different from a chatbot trained on docs?
- A docs chatbot knows what someone wrote about the product, which is usually out of date and never covers everything. A product agent knows the product itself, because it has used every screen. It can tell you what a button is labeled today, take you to it, and in many cases click it for you.
- Does a product agent need access to my source code?
- No. It only needs a user account with the same permissions your users already have, on staging or production. Everything it knows comes from what a logged-in user can see and do, so it can't put feature flags, unlaunched screens, or internal names into anything it writes.
- Knowledge baseA knowledge base is a searchable collection of articles, guides, and answers that explains how a product works, so users and support agents can find answers without asking someone. In SaaS it usually means a public help center plus an internal library that support agents and AI assistants draw on.
- Contextual helpContextual help is assistance that changes based on where the user is and what they are doing in the product, so the answer matches the screen in front of them. It ranges from a tooltip on a single field to an assistant that knows the user's current page and answers accordingly.
- In-app guidanceIn-app guidance is help delivered inside the product interface, where the user is working, instead of in a separate help center, email, or support ticket. It includes tooltips, walkthroughs, checklists, contextual hints, and in-product assistants that answer questions and complete tasks.
- Ticket deflectionTicket deflection is when a customer resolves a question on their own, through self-service help or an automated assistant, instead of opening a support ticket. The deflection rate is the share of would-be tickets resolved this way, and it is the main number used to judge whether self-service is working.