What is a virtual agent?

How does a virtual agent work?

A virtual agent combines conversational AI with the systems a support team uses. It works out what the customer needs, answers from a knowledge base or follows a scripted flow, and may take actions, such as checking an order, through integrations. Many pass the conversation to a person when they can’t help.

Google’s Dialogflow CX documentation, checked on 8 October 2026, describes a CX agent as a virtual agent that handles concurrent conversations with end users, and compares it to a human call centre agent: both are trained to handle expected conversation scenarios.

Older virtual agents follow flows built from intents. Newer ones use a large language model with instructions and a knowledge base, so they cope with questions nobody scripted, at the cost of needing grounding and testing. On a broadband provider’s phone line, for example, a virtual agent might check for an outage in the caller’s area before offering to book an engineer.

What changes when a virtual agent works on a website?

A website virtual agent meets customers where they already are, often partway through a task in your product or docs, so it can answer before they decide to email or call. Its routes to a person differ too: depending on what the website offers, it can hand the conversation to live chat, connect a voice caller to a team member’s phone from the browser, or point people to email or a contact form.

Customers should be able to tell it is software. A virtual agent that says it’s an AI and is clear about what it can’t do sets expectations that a human-sounding voice can blur.

Is Kawl Now a virtual agent?

Yes. Kawl Now is a virtual agent for SaaS websites that customers talk to in their browser. It has no phone number for customers to call and doesn’t answer phone calls. Each workspace gets a support agent and a sales agent, each with its own approved knowledge, instructions, voice and widget.

It answers product questions from approved knowledge and can record feedback, but it can’t look up or change accounts. With human handover off, it tells callers who ask for a person that it can’t transfer the call and points them to your website’s usual contact options. Human handover is an early release: your team verifies a UK or US phone number and turns handover on for each agent, and whoever answers hears a private briefing before the caller is connected. Customer routing is still being tested, so keep your usual contact options visible next to the widget.

Each call stops at 10 minutes, and every AI conversation is saved as a text transcript for your team to read.

Common questions