What are ask forms (forms inside the chat)?
A small form the agent composes mid-conversation — choices, a number, a date — rendered as something to tap rather than a paragraph of questions to answer by typing.
There is a moment in most commercial conversations where the agent needs four specific things before it can be useful: the currency, the amount, the term, the date.
Asked as prose, that becomes a paragraph containing four questions. What comes back is an answer to two of them, in an order you did not ask, with the amount written as "about 1.6m". Then a follow-up question, then a clarification about whether that was dollars.
An ask form replaces that with a few taps.
What the agent can compose
The agent writes the form itself, in the middle of the conversation, from what it needs at that moment. It is not a form you designed in advance and wired to a trigger.
Five kinds of field, mixable in one form:
- single and multi — a choice from enumerable options
- number — with a unit and bounds; thousands separators are shown to the customer and stripped before the agent sees the value, so nobody is parsing "1.6m"
- date — with a permitted range
- text — for the one thing that genuinely is open
The customer fills it in, submits, and the answers come back as a message the agent continues from.
The restraint is the interesting part
The temptation with a feature like this is to use it constantly, and an agent that answers every question with a form is worse than one that never does.
So the agent is instructed to use a form only when the choice is genuinely enumerable, has at least two real options, and is needed to move forward. Open questions — "tell me about your situation" — stay as questions. So do closing pleasantries: nobody wants a radio button for "anything else?", and a form offering a single option reading "end the conversation" is worse than the sentence it replaced.
Why it matters for a business agent
The data comes back structured. A number is a number rather than a phrase to be interpreted, which matters when the next step is calling a quote tool that expects an integer.
Fewer turns to the same place. Four facts in one exchange instead of six messages of clarification — and every extra exchange is somewhere the customer can drift off.
It works in the customer's language. The agent writes the labels as it writes everything else, so a Spanish enquiry gets a Spanish form without anyone maintaining five translations of it.
Where the answers go
A submitted form is not a database write — it comes back as a message the agent reasons from. That matters because the next step is usually one of the other pieces: a number that is fed straight into an MCP tool, a set of choices that determines which branch of a Skill runs, or facts that get remembered in that customer's space so nobody has to ask again next month.
Forms are enabled per agent, so an agent that should only ever answer questions never gains the ability to start asking them.
This is a good example of what an agent adds to a model. The model decides what to ask; rendering it as something tappable, validating what comes back, and handing a clean number to the next tool is all harness.