Agent Studio Office Hours – Optional Slots Drop, Data Passing Deep Dive & User Auth Walkthrough

Hey builders!

Steve, Ryan, and I were in the kitchen today – we launched Optional Slots live on the call, went deep on passing data between actions, tackled output formatting best practices, and walked through user consent auth with Microsoft Graph.

Here's the recap of what we crushed:

1. Optional Slots – Launched Live on This Call 🔥

   → Three slot inference policies now available: Always Ask, Infer if Available, and Always Infer. Always Infer means the assistant never prompts for that slot – it falls back to a DSL expression or null.

   → Two big patterns: smart defaults (fall back to a recently fetched value) and null values (let unused fields pass as null for generic update plugins).

   → Docs: Optional Slots

2. Passing Data Between Actions – Available Data Bank Panel Demo

   → The Available Data button in the action editor shows every field available from previous actions and slots. Click to copy, drag and drop.

   → Set an output key on your action, then reference it downstream with data.output_key.field_name. Works the same in compound actions.

3. Dynamic URLs in Plugin Responses – Use Render, Not LLM Prompts

   → Don't rely on the LLM to stitch URLs together – use the data mapper render() function with a template and args to construct links deterministically.

   → This doc shows the recommended format: URLs/Links in Plugin Responses

4. Display Instructions – What They Can (and Can't) Do

   → Add a key like display_instructions in your output mapper to lightly steer formatting (bullet points, ordering).

   → Clean data > clever instructions. Rename bad keys, flatten unnecessary nesting, strip junk fields.

5. MCP Support & On-Prem APIs

   → Native MCP support coming later this year (Q2/Q3). POC available on the marketplace today using a bridge/proxy pattern.

   → For on-prem APIs, install the Moveworks Agent to securely connect internal services to Agent Studio: Moveworks Agent Installation

Here's the recording to revisit any part of the session or share it with your team: Recording link

Level Up Before Next Session

→ Latest newsletter just dropped – all about slots and how they work: Slots 101: The Inputs That Make Plugins Work

→ Want it delivered to your inbox? Subscribe here: aka.mw/newsletter

→ Register for upcoming Developer Office Hours: Developer Office Hours

Next session is February 18th – and yes, you can bring teammates. See you there 🤖