Introduction to the ADK

The Agent Development Kit (ADK) is a CLI tool and development framework for building AI agents on Botpress. It provides a streamlined development experience with TypeScript support, hot reloading, and type-safe APIs for creating AI applications.

You write conversations, workflows, tools, and actions as code. Botpress handles hosting, scaling, and channel delivery.

What you can build

• Customer support agents that resolve tickets, look up orders, and escalate to humans
• Internal tools that automate workflows across Slack, email, and databases
• Sales assistants that qualify leads, book meetings, and sync with your CRM
• Multi-channel bots that work across webchat, WhatsApp, Telegram, and more

How it works

You write TypeScript. The ADK CLI handles the rest.

adk init my-agent     # Scaffold a project
adk dev               # Run locally with hot reload
adk deploy            # Ship to Botpress Cloud

Your agent is organized around a few core primitives:

Primitive	What it does
Conversations	Handle user messages on a channel
Workflows	Run multi-step background processes
Tools	Give the AI model functions it can call
Actions	Reusable logic callable from anywhere
Tables	Structured data storage
Knowledge	RAG-powered document retrieval
Triggers	React to external events
Custom components	Render custom React UI in webchat
Evals	Automated conversation tests

Each primitive lives in its own file. The ADK discovers them automatically, no manual registration.

Start here