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AI Agents Simplified: How AI Agents Answer Questions Using Domain Knowledge

Demystify how enterprise AI agents are tailored to answer client questions using domain knowledge and strictly confine answers to domain knowledge.

Shawn Shi
Towards Data Science
9 min readJan 13, 2025

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AI agent answering question using domain knowledge. Screenshot taken by author from wealthsimple.com

Background

Have you ever wondered what powers the cutting-edge AI agents on today’s most advanced platforms? For example, in the screenshot above, I ask the AI agent on wealthsimple.com a question on interest rate, it provides an answer specific to Wealthsimple’s products and limits it to Wealthsimple products only. It did not tell me Bank of America’s cash account interest rate.

How does it work? You might say well it is simple, LLM (large language model)! That’s right, but there is a bit more than just LLM. The powerful AI agents, at least the good ones, are powered by large language models so they are capable of language understanding and can carry out support sessions in a conversational format, just like ChatGPT. BUT, a big but, they also have two exceptional features beyond a general purpose ChatGPT:

  1. AI agents search for domain knowledge base and provide up-to-date data to answer your questions. The domain knowledge base can be private enterprise data that is not searchable on the web…

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Towards Data Science
Towards Data Science

Published in Towards Data Science

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Shawn Shi
Shawn Shi

Written by Shawn Shi

Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft. Ex-Machine Learning Engineer. When I am not building applications, I am playing with my kids or outside rock climbing!

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