Search AI vendor Elastic has announced Agent Builder, a complete set of capabilities powered by Elasticsearch, that makes it easy for developers to build custom AI agents on company data, all within minutes. Agent Builder also provides an out-of-the-box conversational experience for exploring, analyzing, and optimizing any data in Elasticsearch.
The company kicked off Elastic at its event in San Francisco with a packed room and a big announcement on Monday.
“Elastic Agent Builder is now available in technical preview on Elastic Cloud in serverless!” said Ken Exner, chief product officer at Elastic. “I’m excited for developers to start using Agent Builder, which provides a conversational experience out of the box. At Elastic, we’re eager to use it too! We’re launching an internal hackathon for all Elasticians to see how they’ll use Agent Builder to better serve our customers, automate work and even create new products.”
As AI agents evolve to take on more complex and data-driven enterprise tasks, reliability and accuracy depend on delivering accurate context. In most enterprises, this context is scattered across various unstructured data sources, including documents, emails, business apps, and customer feedback. The process for getting the relevant context into agents at the right time is known as context engineering. While Elasticsearch has always been a leading platform for the core of context engineering, Agent Builder dramatically expands on this strength. It simplifies the entire operational lifecycle of agents, their development, configuration, execution, customization, and observability directly into Elasticsearch.
Exner said that with Agent Builder, you can simplify development of AI agents and chat experiences based on data in Elastic, and natively chat with any data in Elastic, using a built-in agent that enables deep natural language exploration and analysis where you can ask questions and interact with any data you have in Elasticsearch, turning your data into an active, conversational partner.
You can also build AI agents that achieve higher accuracy, relevance, and efficiency based on the power of hybrid search. A built-in, native conversational agent lets you use and extend Elastic-hosted MCP tools to quickly connect answers and context from Elasticsearch to your custom applications. The search capability understands the structure of that data, translates natural language into optimized semantic, hybrid or structured queries, and returns only the most relevant context to the Large Language Model.
You can also build powerful custom tools, which you can define to give the agent new skills, harnessing the full power of Elasticsearch’s query language (ES|QL) to precisely control what data is used for context. This gives granular control over the relevance, accuracy, and security of your agent’s responses.
Defining custom agents is also possible. You can create your own custom agent from the ground up, going beyond the built-in options. You control the agent’s entire persona with a custom system prompt, decide exactly which tools it can access, and configure its specific security profile to meet your needs.
Finally, you can integrate with MCP and A2A Safely. You can connect external agents and applications via MCP and A2A, while maintaining governance through the Elasticsearch execution layer.
”AI agents don’t just need lots of data, they need the right data and tools, with relevance, guardrails, and observability built in,” Exner stated. “Developers already rely on Elasticsearch to find the right answer from their messy business data. Agent Builder goes further by making Elasticsearch one of the fastest platforms to build precise AI agents that use your data, where retrieval, governance, and orchestration all operate in one place, natively.”
With Agent Builder, developers have built-in tools that go beyond basic run queries of open-standard Model Context Protocol (MCP) endpoints. Users of Agent Builder on Elasticsearch can ask natural language questions, identify which indexes to query, configure searches, define agent parameters and more.
Agent Builder in Elasticsearch is available today in Technical Preview on Elastic Cloud in serverless and coming soon in version 9.2.