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| title | description | contentType |
|---|---|---|
| What's a tool in AI? | Understand tools in the context of AI. Learn what's special about tools in n8n. | explanation |
What's a tool in AI?
In AI, 'tools' has a specific meaning. Tools act like addons that your AI can use to access extra context or resources.
Here are a couple of other ways of expressing it:
Tools are interfaces that an agent can use to interact with the world (source{:target=_blank .external-link})
We can think of these tools as being almost like functions that your AI model can call (source{:target=_blank .external-link})
AI tools in n8n
n8n provides tool sub-nodes that you can connect to your AI agent. As well as providing some popular tools, such as Wikipedia and SerpAPI, n8n provides three especially powerful tools:
- Custom n8n Workflow Tool: use this to load any n8n workflow as a tool.
- Custom Code Tool: write code that your agent can run.
- HTTP Request Tool: make calls to fetch a website or data from an API.
The next three examples highlight the Custom n8n Workflow Tool:
You can also learn how to let AI dynamically specify parameters for tools with the $fromAI() function.