Configuring agentic search

Introduced 3.3

This is an experimental UI feature. For updates on the progress of the feature or if you want to leave feedback, join the discussion on the OpenSearch forum.

Agentic search lets you ask questions in natural language and have OpenSearch agents plan and execute the retrieval automatically. OpenSearch Dashboards offers an intuitive UI for configuring agents, equipping agents with different tools, and executing agentic searches.

Prerequisites

Before configuring agentic search, ensure that you fulfill the following prerequisites.

Provision ML resources

To configure new agents, be sure to first provision appropriate models. For working examples, see Model configuration.

Ingest data

Ensure that you have a sufficient number of documents in your cluster to reasonably evaluate your agentic searches. For more information, see Agentic search.

Example: Product search with GPT-5

This example uses a deployed OpenAI GPT-5 model described in this documentation.

To build and test your agentic search workflow in OpenSearch Dashboards, follow these steps:

Go to OpenSearch Dashboards and select OpenSearch Plugins > AI Search Flows from the top menu.
On the Workflows page, select the New workflow tab, as shown in the following image. In the Agentic Search template, select Create.
Provide a unique workflow Name and an optional Description, as shown in the following image. Then select Create to create your workflow. You are automatically directed to the workflow editor, where you can begin configuring the agent.
Under Configure agent, select Create new agent, as shown in the following image. Once you configure an agent, you can select or update existing agents. For full agent customization, toggle to the JSON view and edit directly.
Under Agent, enter a unique Name and Description for the agent, as shown in the following image. Under Tools > Query Planning > Query planning model, select OpenAI GPT-5. Then select Create agent.
Under Test flow > Index, select the index you’d like to search, as shown in the following image. Under Test flow > Query, enter a natural language query. Optionally, specify query fields for the agent to search in your selected index. To edit the full agentic search query directly, toggle to the JSON view. Then select Search. The agent may take several seconds to execute.
Under Generated query, view the query domain-specific language (DSL) that the agent generated and ran against your cluster.
Under Search results, select Raw response, the formatted table of Hits, or Aggregations to view the results.