Core Docs - Core Concepts - Intro to Agents

Rock Version: v20.0
Last Modified: 2026-07-15 1:43 PM

Your best skill isn't finding records in a database. It's caring for people.

Rock has always been built to help your team spend less time on administration and more time on ministry. Agents are the next step in that mission, and they change how the work gets done.

A Rock agent is an AI assistant built right into Rock. Ask it a question in plain language and it searches, looks up, logs and retrieves without you navigating a single menu. It knows your data, speaks your language and gets things done while you stay focused on the person in front of you.

Here are a few things you can ask a well-configured agent right now:

You don't need to know where any of that information lives in Rock. Just ask.

The goal has never been to replace the people doing ministry. It's to give them back the time to do more of it.

An agent is made up of three things working together:

You decide which skills and tools each agent gets, and you write the instructions. Rock handles the rest.

You'll probably have more than one agent

The first thing to know is that there are two kinds of agents, Chat Agents and MCP Agents.

No matter which agent you pick, different people in your organization need different things from their agent, and different levels of access. That's why Rock lets you configure multiple agents.

A staff agent can reach most of Rock's capabilities. This is a good fit for the agent you dock in the chat panel, so a staff member working a Person Profile has it a click away.

A volunteer agent works with a tighter set of permissions. It might look things up without making changes, and its instructions might tell it to ask for clarification more often, since volunteers may not know your internal terminology.

A public-facing agent is stripped down to a few essentials: service times, event information and campus locations. It lives on your website and talks to anyone.

As your organization gets more comfortable with agents, they can start taking on routine back-office work too. Work that used to be manual gets done by typing or talking it through instead. You can even ask for several things at once, which is no problem for a Rock agent.

Safety and your data

Rock's agents work within the same security model you already use. If a person can't see a record in Rock, the agent can't show it to them. For a full look at how security works, see the Agent Security article.