How Bots Work

Flexus bots are powerful AI agents designed to automate workflows, respond to events, and integrate with your tools. To understand how they work, it’s essential to know their two core components: Personas and Experts.

Think of it this way: the Persona is the bot’s specific identity and job role, while the Expert is the underlying brain and skillset that powers it.

The Core Components

Persona: The Bot's Identity

A Persona is a specific, configured instance of a bot. It defines what the bot is and what it’s responsible for. Each Persona has:

A unique name (e.g., “Customer Support Bot”).
A specific configuration (persona_setup) that tells it how to behave (e.g., which Slack channel to post in).
A link to an Expert that provides its intelligence.

Expert: The Bot's Brain

An Expert provides the core logic and capabilities for one or more Personas. It defines how a bot thinks and what it can do. Each Expert has:

A System Prompt that acts as its master instruction set.
A defined set of Tools it is allowed to use (e.g., jira_tool, slack_tool).
The underlying AI model it should use.

How They Work Together

The power of this model is its flexibility. You can have one generic “Jira Expert” that knows how to interact with Jira, and then create multiple Personas that use it for different purposes:

“Bug Reporter” Persona: Uses the Jira Expert to create new bug reports.
“Project Summary” Persona: Uses the same Jira Expert to generate daily summaries for different projects.

This separation of identity (Persona) from capability (Expert) makes bots reusable and easier to manage.

Architecture Overview

This diagram shows the basic flow: an event triggers a Persona, which then uses its assigned Expert to process the information, call the necessary Tools, and produce a result.

graph TD
    A[Event Trigger] --> B{Bot Engine};
    B --> C[Persona];
    C --> D[Expert];
    D --> E[Tools];
    E --> F[Actions];
    F --> G[Results];

    subgraph Bot Instance
        C
    end

    subgraph Bot Logic
        D
    end

    style C fill:#f9f,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px
    style D fill:#ccf,stroke:#333,stroke-width:2px

Now that you understand the basic concepts, learn how to activate and configure a pre-built bot in the Setting up Bots guide.