Hightouch Agents are AI-powered tools that help you create, analyze, and manage marketing workflows across your connected data.
Learning objectives
After reading this article, you’ll understand:
- What Hightouch Agents are and how they fit into your workflow
- The capabilities and data scopes of each agent type
- How to configure and interact with agents in Hightouch
- How permissions, customization, and advanced settings work
Overview
With over 300+ native integrations across the marketing stack and deep data warehouse connectivity, Hightouch is uniquely positioned to support agentic marketing.
Agents work on specific problems within your marketing organization—creating audiences, designing journeys, building analyses, and generating content—while keeping you in control of every decision.
Agents operate with full awareness of your business context, data, and goals. You can collaborate with them directly in chat-style sessions, guiding their work and reviewing all outputs before publishing.
Agent types
Hightouch offers multiple agents, each specialized for a specific marketing or analytics workflow.
| Agent | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Audience Agent | Create, preview, and modify audiences based on your Customer Studio schema. Explore available fields and existing audiences to avoid duplication. |
| Journey Agent | Design multi-step customer journeys by describing your campaign goals. The agent recommends appropriate entry conditions, timing, destinations, and more. |
| Charts Agent | Build charts and metrics to visualize Customer Studio data—such as audience growth, conversion funnels, and geographic breakdowns. |
| Analytics Agent | Analyze your data warehouse for insights on product performance, user behavior, funnels, and retention—delivering answers in real time. |
| Campaigns Agent | Optimize advertising strategies with AI-driven recommendations, optimization strategies, and creative performance analyses. |
| Content Agent | Generate ready-to-send email templates the conform to your brand tone, style, and campaign goals. Experiment with different imagery, subject lines, and content. |
| Custom Agents | Build your own agents to automate recurring workflows. Examples include monitoring key event feeds and receiving alerts if volume drops; generating weekly reports and analyses on all campaigns and experiments launched in the previous week; and producing weekly curated lists of suggested audiences highlighting under-targeted or high-propensity users. |
How agents work
Agents differ in their data access and scope. Some operate solely on your Customer Studio schema, while others also query your data warehouse, external tools, or web data.
Schema-based agents
Operate on metadata and logic from your Customer Studio schema.
Includes:
- Audience Agent
- Journey Agent
- Charts Agent
These agents use:
- Parent model names
- Column names and descriptions
- Destination names
- Column value suggestions
- Existing audiences and their filter criteria (not individual user data)
- Existing journeys and their structure (not individual user-level journey data)
These agents do not query warehouse data directly.
For example:
- The Audience Agent can draft and size an audience using schema-based metadata.
- The Charts Agent can select appropriate chart types and conditions, which are then executed against your warehouse through Hightouch’s query engine.
To get started, configure your default parent model in Settings. You can switch models anytime during a chat session.
Warehouse and external-data agents
These agents leverage both your schema and your warehouse, along with external integrations and web data.
Includes:
- Analytics Agent
- Campaigns Agent
- Content Agent
Analytics Agent – Queries your warehouse for behavioral, product, and retention analysis. Queries are scoped to the tables defined in your Customer Studio schema.
Campaigns Agent – Analyzes ad performance by combining metrics from connected ad platforms with downstream warehouse data. Supports ROAS, CPA, LTV, and cross-channel cohort analysis. Requires authenticated access to Ads destinations.
Content Agent – Generates HTML or creative content from inputs such as Figma designs, prior templates, and warehouse-backed audience data to determine which variants perform best.
Custom agents
Custom Agents operate with the same scopes as other Hightouch Agents. Custom Agents are configured to run on a schedule and can deliver reports via Email or Slack when complete.
Using agents
To start, enter your question or goal in the prompt window. The Hightouch Routing Agent determines which specialized agent(s) can best assist.
During a session:
- The selected agent begins analysis or generation tasks.
- You may be prompted for additional details (e.g., timeframe, campaign type).
- When results are ready, you can preview, modify, and save the output.
If an agent drafts a new audience, journey, or chart, you can save them directly from your chat session and begin using them throughout Customer Studio.
Ideation mode
When asking a complex question that might require deep reasoning, you can enable Ideation mode. When this is enabled, the agent will generate multiple hypotheses and try to validate them in order to answer your question. Answers take much longer in Ideation mode, so only use this in cases where you need a very detailed or nuanced answer.
Advanced settings
Provide richer business context so agents can tailor recommendations to your organization.
In Settings → Agents, you can define:
- Business description – High-level context about your company and marketing goals
- Model guidance – Rules or preferences agents should follow (e.g., always include loyalty tier fields in new audiences, or check for duplicates before creating one)
As you chat with agents, you’ll also see assumptions referenced in the responses. If you like the definitions and want to ensure they’re used for future chats, save them as Memories. You can review all of the Memories for your workspace from the Settings page.
Permissions
Access to different agents is granted on a workspace and/or user level.
Agents respect other Hightouch permissions and never take autonomous action without human approval.
For example, during chats, the agents may draft audiences or journeys, but users must review the outputs and can only save them if they have the appropriate Customer Studio permissions.
Sample questions
You can ask Hightouch Agents natural-language questions or give goal-oriented prompts like:
- “Create an audience of users who created an account in the last 30 days but haven’t made a purchase.”
- “Which products resonate most with my most loyal buyers?”
- “Of all customers who purchased Product X, who are in the top 10% by revenue?”
- “What was my best-performing creative last week?”
- “Show me my top five products by conversion rate in the last 30 days.”
- “For each product, does including a human in the ad improve performance?”