Tools

Tools are the capabilities you give your AI agents. They allow agents to go beyond conversation — searching the web, reading spreadsheets, sending emails, booking appointments, and interacting with any external API.

How Tools Work

When you assign tools to an agent, here’s what happens during a conversation:

The agent receives a message from a user or caller.
The agent decides whether it needs to use a tool to answer the question or complete a task.
The agent calls the tool with the appropriate parameters.
The tool executes — making an API call, querying a database, or performing an action.
The agent receives the result and uses it to formulate its response.

The agent handles all of this automatically. You just need to assign the right tools and the agent figures out when and how to use them.

Assigning Tools to an Agent

From the Dashboard

Navigate to Agents and select your agent (or create a new one).
Scroll to the Tools section.
Click Add Tool to browse available tools.
Select a tool, configure its settings (API keys, permissions, etc.).
Save the agent.

Your agent can have multiple tools assigned simultaneously. It will choose the right tool based on the conversation context.

Via the API

You can also assign tools when creating or updating an agent through the API:

curl -X POST https://api.thinnest.ai/agents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Research Assistant",
    "instructions": "You help users research topics using web search and Wikipedia.",
    "tools": [
      { "type": "duckduckgo" },
      { "type": "wikipedia" }
    ]
  }'

Tool Execution Flow

User asks: "What's the weather in Tokyo?"
         │
         ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│  Agent processes     │
│  the message         │
└─────────┬───────────┘
          │ Agent decides it needs weather data
          ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│  Agent calls the     │
│  OpenWeather tool    │
│  with city: "Tokyo"  │
└─────────┬───────────┘
          │ Tool returns weather data
          ▼
┌─────────────────────┐
│  Agent formats the   │
│  response naturally  │
│  "It's 22°C in       │
│   Tokyo today..."    │
└─────────────────────┘

Tool Categories

thinnestAI provides a wide range of built-in tools organized by category:

Category	Tools	Use Cases
Search	DuckDuckGo, Tavily, Exa, SerpAPI, Wikipedia, PubMed, ArXiv	Web research, fact checking, academic research
Web Scraping	Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, JinaReader, Spider, Newspaper	Extracting content from websites
Data & Analytics	Dash, DuckDB, CSV, SQL, PostgreSQL, BigQuery, Pandas	Self-learning database queries, analyzing data
Finance	YFinance, OpenBB	Stock prices, financial data, market analysis
AI Generation	DALL-E 3, ElevenLabs TTS, Replicate, FAL	Image generation, text-to-speech, AI models
Productivity	GitHub, Linear, Todoist, Confluence, ClickUp, Cal.com	Project management, task tracking, scheduling
Communication	WhatsApp, Slack, Discord, Telegram, MS Teams, Zoom, SMS	Messaging, notifications, meeting management
CRM	HubSpot, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Apollo, ActiveCampaign	Contact management, lead tracking, outreach
Cloud	AWS Lambda, AWS SES, Apify, E2B	Serverless functions, email delivery, web scraping
Google Suite	Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sheets	Email, scheduling, spreadsheets
Other	Google Maps, OpenWeather, Calculator, File operations	Location, weather, math, file handling

What’s Next

Built-in Tools — Browse all available tools and what they do.
Custom Tools — Create your own tools with custom API endpoints.
Google Calendar — Set up appointment booking.
Gmail — Automate email workflows.
WhatsApp — Send messages, interactive buttons, and media via WhatsApp Business.
SMS — Send text messages from your agents.
CRM & Webhooks — Connect to CRMs and external systems.

​Tools

​How Tools Work

​Assigning Tools to an Agent

​From the Dashboard

​Via the API

​Tool Execution Flow

​Tool Categories

​What’s Next