No template. No ceiling. Your role, your rules, your scope.
Custom agents in Helm are built from scratch with your own role, instructions, tool scope, skills, and autonomy. Pre-built templates are optional. Every configuration surface is yours: what the agent knows, what it can touch, what it decides on its own, and what it costs per month. Ideal for niche workflows, compliance-heavy work, and domain-specific jobs no template covers.
Pre-built roles are a fast start. Custom agents are right when your workflow, voice, or guardrails don't fit a generic template.
Your industry has specific language, guardrails, or audit trails a generic template would never enforce. Bake them into a custom agent from the start.
Enterprise vs small-business, US vs EU, SaaS vs agency. One tuned custom agent per segment beats one generic agent for everyone.
Onboarding checklists, internal QA, RFP qualification, stand-up summaries. Jobs your team does that no pre-built role captures.
Your agency tone, your firm's terminology, the way you talk to your clients. Custom instructions plus custom skills lock it in across every reply.
You have a 10-step onboarding process from a binder nobody reads. Encode it as a custom agent's instructions and skills. The process runs itself.
Testing a new workflow or offer? Spin up a custom agent with a narrow scope. Validate before hard-coding it into a template or workflow.
Most fields have sensible defaults so you can go live in minutes. Tune deeper whenever you want.
Step 1
Name, color, avatar. Optional: pick an existing role as a starting point, or leave role empty to go fully custom.
Step 2
Write free-form instructions explaining the agent's job, tone, and constraints. Enable any library or custom skills for domain expertise.
Step 3
Grant tool groups (tasks, projects, billing, and more) as read or read-write. Set autonomy: observe, suggest, or auto. Override per channel if needed.
Step 4
Set a monthly spending limit, Slack access level, and DM handler flag. Save. The agent is live.
Real scenarios where a custom agent beats any template. Your own will look different, and that is the point.
Takes SOPs as skills, reads every project document against them, and flags compliance gaps before submission. Suggest-only autonomy. Restricted to the compliance project scope.
For your top five clients. Custom instructions lock in white-glove tone. Pro skills in sales outreach and account management. Auto mode on Slack, suggest-only on email.
Runs every weekday morning on a schedule. Pulls status from the PM tool, summarizes blockers, posts to a Slack channel. Observe mode elsewhere. Read-only on everything except its own Slack post.
Reads every outbound proposal for tone, pricing consistency, and required legal language. Skills: content writing, your custom legal-review skill. Suggest mode with draft approval.
Yes. The minimum to create an agent is a name and instructions. Role selection is optional. Leave it blank, write what you want the agent to do, and it runs on your instructions alone.
Yes, in practice. Start a new agent, select a predefined role as the starting point, and the role's default instructions and skill suggestions populate. Edit anything you want, save, and the new agent lives independently from the library role. The original template stays untouched.
Interactive agent type, Suggest autonomy level, Task Management tool group at read-write, color from the default palette, Slack access set to everyone, DM handler off. Everything is adjustable before or after creation.
Creating a reusable custom role is supported, so the next agent you spin up can inherit the same default instructions. Full agent-template sharing (role plus skills plus tools plus workflows in a single importable bundle) is on the roadmap.
Agent count depends on your plan. Pro and Business plans support multiple custom agents per workspace. See the Pricing page for specifics. Each agent has an independent monthly cost cap so runaway spend is impossible.
Yes. Every agent, template-based or custom, can connect to 300+ external tools via Composio on Pro and Business plans. Grant tool access per agent, per integration. Scope read vs read-write.
Every configuration surface is yours. Start small, scale deep, ship in minutes.