AI Agents & Automation intermediate

Tool Use

A model calling external software — search, code, APIs, databases — instead of answering from memory.

Tool use is what lets a model do things it fundamentally cannot do alone: look up current data, run exact calculations, write to a system. The model chooses the tool and the arguments; your code executes it and returns the result. Tools are also the point where a model’s mistakes become real-world actions, so permissions matter.

In practice: Rather than guessing today’s rate, the model calls a currency API.

Where this comes up