Main Agent Builder Page

Project overview

The Agent Builder in IBM watsonx Orchestrate unlocks the ability to create generative AI agents without creating code. Easily build agents that can answer questions grounded in tailored content and work in systems. Combine agents together for a more powerful result in one place and setting guardrails to help ensure that your agents behave as expected.

Goals

Create the AI Agent building experience to replace the AI Assistant building experience as the main focus of wxo.

Build a low/no code agent building experience that minimized the technical knowledge needed to create agentic outcomes.

 

Early Ideation. The canvas view was determined to be more than we could contain as an MVP but we are still working on it.

Key Responsibilities

  • Lead UX design strategy for wxo’s AI agent builder

  • Drive design excellence across cross-functional teams

  • Created the early low/mid fi designs to gather executive buy in

  • Scoped and prioritized all design work items

Challenges

  • This is such a cutting edge space there aren’t clear industry patterns yet

  • Our users didn’t even know yet what they wanted to do with the technology

  • We had baggage from previous versions of the product that we had to try to replace or minimize.

Critical Tradeoffs

We early on in the process decided not to dive into a canvas/visualization or a chat based building experience. Even though we thought they would be very impactful and useful we decided we couldn’t contain the work in time for our THINK conference announcement (we are currently working on both items)

I originally was pushing for a dual agent model where some agents were orchestrators and some were expert agents. Each had different roles and potentially gave users more structure but we decided to have a more flat agent hierarchy to prevent the need to explain the differences between types and reduce time to value.

Impact

  • In the first year IBM’s internal AskHR agent resolved over 100,000 employee inquiries.

  • 25% reduced time to launch of an agent vs RPA solutions meaning agents go live weeks earlier.

  • Reportedly higher employee satisfaction and quicker onboarding of new employee’s in HR use cases.

2025 iF Design Award winner

IBM watsonx Orchestrate is a generative AI and automation platform that empowers your business users by automating tasks, simplifying complex processes, and ultimately saving you and your team time and effort by making your organization more productive with the use of AI assistants and agents. IBM watsonx Orchestrate has a skills catalog with 1000s of pre-built skills to help you accomplish a wide range of tasks. You can quickly and easily create and deploy your purpose-built AI assistant with helpful conversations that help end users get work done, and build your own custom skills and workflows without the need for coding expertise.