What is Agent Designer and Why You Need to Design Your Instructions

The AI revolution has landed in your Org. But without clear instructions, your AI Agent is just guessing.

AI Agents are here to stay. You can use them to transform how businesses automate work, support users, and deliver insights, but don’t be seduced by the low/no-code interfaces to build your agents. No/low-code does not equal No/low design.

If you want predictable, transparent, and effective outcomes, you must design your Agent’s behavior with intention. That’s where Agent Designer comes in.

Agent Designer: This is a key feature of Elements.cloud’s FREE tier of its Change Intelligence Platform.  It has been built for every Salesforce professional who wants to leverage the power of Agentforce.

Why Design AI Agent Instructions?

Think of your AI Agent as a new digital employee. Would you throw a new intern into the wild with no onboarding, no playbook, and vague responsibilities? Would you trust them to do ‘what they think is best’ based on generic knowledge from the LLM, with no consideration for company practices? Of course not. 

Yet, without a clear design, that’s what you are doing when you build an AI Agent by adding some Actions and a few Instructions. The result is an unreliable AI Agent, and a huge amount of time wasted during testing, where you keep adding more and more Instructions. 

A design-led approach enables you to build, govern, and deploy an AI Agent far faster. The small amount of time it takes upfront for the design is saved 10 times over through the time it saves in testing, rework, and getting to a reliable agent ready for production.

Agents need to be well-architected, with clear consideration for when deterministic actions need to be invoked and when probabilistic reasoning needs to be applied. 

Without clear, well-architected instructions, your AI Agent will:

• Breach compliance boundaries
• Struggle with decisions
• Behave inconsistently
• Or simply act… weird

That’s not innovation. That’s a risk.

Want to learn patterns and anti-patterns of Agent Instructions? Read this accompanying guide.

Elements Agent Designer changes the game. It lets Salesforce professionals design modular, governed, and testable agent instructions all through intuitive diagrams purpose-built for AI behavior.

Not Only For Agentforce

This approach works for designing an AI Agent for any agentic platform, as they all work in a similar way. They all need a Scope, Instructions, and Actions. We’ve built Gemini Gems (Google) and CustomGPTs (OpenAI) using a diagram-based approach and it is a very quick and effective way of getting a working agent.

As an example, it took only a day to build a really impressive Business Analysis Agent using a process-led approach. It will have a discussion with you and help you scope out your business process. It then gives you a table of the process steps along with the input, outputs, and resources. The output can then be given to the Elements.cloud AI diagram generator, which draws the process diagram for you.

What Is an Agent Instruction Diagram?

It’s not a flowchart. It’s not a process map. It’s not a chatbot workflow. It’s a blueprint for a JTBD (Job To Be Done) .

Agent Instruction Diagrams let you visually map out, in collaboration with the stakeholders:

• What your AI Agent should do
  
• How it should behave across different scenarios
  
• What deterministic actions it should take and when (your actions)
  
• What hard rules it must always follow (your guardrails)
  
• When it needs to perform more complex reasoning, interpretation, or generation (your prompt templates) 

With Agent Instruction Diagrams, you are mixing prompt engineering with systems design. You’re providing the reasoned flow for an AI Agent to operate with judgment, reliability, and compliance.

The Agent Instruction Diagrams generate the Instructions that are used in the AI Agent. They help you define the Actions that you need to create for your Agent. 

To be clear, the AI Agent is not following the process like a workflow. It is using the instructions to work out where it is in the process at any point in its conversation so that it can decide how to plan, what response to give, or what action to perform. Just like your intern.

When Should You Design Your Agent Instructions?

In short, always.

Even if the AI Agent is fairly simple. The diagram is more than a design document for the AI Agent. It is used to:

•  Engage business users, using natural language, and agree scope of the agent and topics
•  Design actions vs instructions vs guardrails 
•  Validate and suggest improvements to instructions
•  Generate unambiguous instructions
•  Debug during test/evaluation
•  Evaluate end-to-end scenarios
•  Demonstrate compliance and audit trail
•  Explain behavior, track approvals from stakeholders, and get signoff

Again, think about the ‘digital employee’ analogy. People are not hired blindly to do unspecified work. High-performing organizations excel when objectives, the activities to achieve those objectives, roles and responsibilities, and jobs to be done (JTBD), are clearly understood and communicated across stakeholders. AI Agents are not different.

How to Design with Agent Designer

Here’s how you design great AI Agent instructions:

🛠 Step 1: Create an Agent Instruction Diagram

Start from the AI Agents section in Elements.cloud, click “New Agent” to open a new Agent Instruction Diagram in a purpose-built canvas. You can click the pencil icon next to the diagram name i the right panel to edit it.

🚧 Step 2: Add Guardrails

Drag the Guardrails shape to define absolute “always” and “never” rules.

• Never answer pricing questions.
  
• Always be professional, empathetic, and polite.

Guardrails are your red lines. Keep them few but firm.

🔄 Step 3: Use Specialized Instruction Shapes

Choose from three instruction types:

• Agent Instruction – interpret, decide, and act probabilistically
  e.g., “Ask user to provide their case number”
  
• Agent Action – deterministic system tasks
  e.g., “Get case based on provided case number”
  
• Agent Prompt Template – complex interpretation or reasoning
  e.g., “Analyze case and troubleshoot their issue”

Each shape is pre-populated with context-aware prompts and expected conditions.

🔁 Step 4: Map out the logic

The notation used in Agent Instruction Diagrams is simple. The magic lies in providing logical, unambiguous, discrete details on both flowlines and activities to inform how the Agent should be behaving. Create this by engaging with your stakeholders to design the perfect AI Agent.

Every flowline coming into the activity box serves as a condition. It explains when / under what circumstances an AI Agent should consider performing that particular activity. The activity (Instruction, Action, or Prompt Template) should specify what to do. 

For instance, in the example below, we can see that the AI Agent will analyze the call transcript using our custom ‘discovery framework’ and log comments on the account record. But:

• The decision on how to interpret the call transcript is not left to the AI Agent to figure out or creatively guess. This is handled by a dedicated prompt template that allows the business to provide strict rules on what to look for and in what format to generate the output.
• This action will only be invoked after the AI Agent has fetched the transcript and has received confirmation from the sales rep that they indeed want to do that (human in the loop).

Mapping logical instructions that align with prompt engineering best practices is a learned skill. But Agent Designer comes equipped with an automatic instruction quality checker, which is in the right panel under “Insights.” Learn more in this guide.

🧠 Step 5: Generate Instructions

With one click, you can:

• Generate textual instructions to paste into your Agent Builder
  
• Generate test cases based on diagram logic
  

The diagram becomes the source of truth.

🔁 Step 6: Paste Instructions in Agent Builder

The instructions are now in your clipboard. Simply open up Salesforce Agent Builder and paste them into a single instruction field in the Topic.

BTW This will work for many agent platforms as the agent is driven by instructions. As an example, at Elements we also create AID to build our Google Gemini Gems and OpenAI CustomGPTs, alongside our Agentforce Agents.

🔁 Step 7: Iterate, Don’t Improvise

Testing your Agent and it’s going off-script? Don’t just change the instructions in your Agent Builder.

This is absolutely critical. Think of the instruction diagram as the master design. If you change the instructions in Agent Builder instead of changing the diagram and regenerating the instructions, you will overwrite your changes on the next iteration of the diagram.

Go back to the diagram to pinpoint why the Agent has an issue. Is it the logic? Is it the phrasing of the text on a line or in an activity box? Make the changes, regenerate instructions, and redeploy. A snapshot of the diagram and instructions is taken so you can get back to earlier versions. 

Why This Matters

When you treat your Agent as a digital employee, not a glorified chatbot, you realize the need for instructional design.

Agent Designer gives you:

• Clarity on expected behavior
• A shared artifact for cross-functional collaboration
•  A tool for reviewing and signing off AI Agents that conform to business rules
• Modular logic for testability
• Prompt engineering best practices

It’s the missing link between AI ambition and AI execution.

Ready to Try It?

Start designing your first AI Agent with Agent Designer today.