Creating use cases

A use case describes a situation in your own words so the agent recognises it. Writing them well is the whole skill.

A use case describes a situation in your own words so the agent recognises it. Writing them well is the whole skill.

Create one

1. Open the AI agent's use cases.
2. Add one and describe the situation.
3. Give examples of how customers raise it.
4. Set what should happen: a reply, a dialogue, an action, a handover.
5. Test with phrasings you did not use in the examples.

Describe the situation, not the words

"The customer wants to know where their order is" works. A list of exact phrases does not, because customers will use the phrase you did not think of.

The examples are there to show the shape, not to be matched.

Use their words in the examples

Take them from real conversations rather than writing what you imagine. Real messages are shorter, vaguer and worse spelled than anything you would invent, and that is what the agent has to cope with.

Keep them apart

Two use cases describing nearly the same situation make the agent choose between them, and it will sometimes choose wrongly. Where two overlap, merge them or sharpen the boundary until it is a distinction you could explain to a new colleague.

One outcome each

A use case that leads to three possible outcomes is really three use cases, or a dialogue. Keeping it to one makes the behaviour predictable and the transcripts readable.

Start with your top five

The five most common contacts. Get those right, watch the transcripts, then add. Twenty use cases written on day one are twenty things you cannot yet tell are working.

See also

• Creating generative procedures
• Creating a dialogue
• Importing historical data to train the agent