Introducing Guided Discovery: Finding the right recommendation for every customer

Today, we’re introducing Guided Discovery, a new capability that helps Decagon agents navigate exploratory conversations across product discovery, retention, and expansion. Instead of relying on predefined workflows for every possible user need, agents can better handle open-ended inquiries like a great concierge: asking the right follow-up questions, understanding context, and guiding users toward the right outcome.

Guided Discovery builds on the momentum we’ve already shipped toward delivering concierge customer experiences, including user memory for deeper personalization and outbound voice for proactive engagement. Together, these capabilities enable customer-facing agents to deliver more adaptive, helpful experiences that build stronger customer relationships.

Built for conversations that don’t follow a script

Many agentic workflows are still built rigidly, with predefined paths, existing SOPs, and decision-tree logic. That works well when a customer comes in with a clear problem to solve. But real-world conversations are more nuanced, with users comparing options, hesitating before checkout, or revealing new context as the conversation unfolds. Not every moment fits neatly into a branch that can be mapped in advance.

Delivering concierge experiences requires agents that can navigate the full range of conversations, from highly prescriptive workflows to open-ended dialogue. Guided Discovery is built for use cases where the path emerges through conversation.

That flexibility is powered by advances in our Agent Operating Procedures, or AOPs. AOPs use natural language instructions to define what agents should understand, reason through, and act on. With our next-generation AOP engine, agents work from higher-level instructions, maintain full context across users and sessions, and reason toward a goal rather than follow a fixed path, all while staying within the guardrails your business defines. That’s what unlocks a much broader range of concierge experiences. 

What Guided Discovery unlocks for businesses

Guided Discovery expands agents beyond post-purchase support into the moments before a user becomes a customer. And once a user becomes a customer, the same capability can support higher-value lifecycle moments like retention, loyalty, and expansion. 

Agentic commerce starts with product discovery

A customer visits an outdoor retailer looking for a tent. The agent already has useful context from user memory, remembering that the customer prioritizes value, has purchased family-oriented gear before, and lives in the Pacific Northwest.

As the conversation unfolds, the customer shares that they’re planning a first-time family camping trip with two young kids and a dog. The agent reasons across the full context provided, including past preferences, budget, family size, trip type, and destination. And it catches something the customer missed: the tent they were considering is built for backpacking, not car camping.

Instead of simply answering the original question, the agent recommends a better-fit tent, explains why, and surfaces relevant add-ons such as a weatherproof footprint, a family sleeping bag bundle, and a camp kitchen set. By the end of the conversation, the agent has helped the customer build a more complete shopping cart for the trip.

That’s the difference between a scripted recommendation flow and Guided Discovery. The agent understands the user’s goal, gathers the right context, calls the right tools, and reasons toward the best outcome.

Customer loyalty and retention

Retention conversations are high stakes. When a customer is showing signs of frustration, a generic script usually isn’t enough to retain them. The agent needs to understand what’s driving the dissatisfaction and respond with the right next step.

Imagine a customer reaches out because they haven’t been using their subscription and don’t see the value in keeping it. A rigid workflow might have the agent recite product benefits before proceeding with a cancellation flow. With Guided Discovery, the agent can recognize the frustration, adjust its tone, and diagnose the underlying reason for the issue.

From there, it can guide the customer toward the most relevant path forward, whether that’s a better-fit plan, a promotion, or a clearer explanation of value. Customer loyalty is built in moments like these, when the customer feels heard and the response actually matches what they need.

Our most adaptable AI concierge yet

With Guided Discovery, every conversation becomes an opportunity to recommend the right thing and build the kind of trust in a relationship that compounds over time.

Building and refining Guided Discovery workflows is made even easier with Duet, your AI agent building partner. Through a simple chat interface, teams can write goal-oriented AOPs by using plain natural language, automatically generate scenarios to stress-test workflows before they go live, and continuously surface trends and improvements from real conversations so that your agent keeps getting better with every interaction.

Ready to see it in action? Book a demo.