Agentic AI
Basics
How to choose the tools for your AI agents?
May 16, 2025
Radek Kysely
Lead AI Developer
If you are building autonomous AI agents that connect to an external app (CRMs, e-mail, calendars, etc), chances are you had to make a decision which tool (or MCP servers) your agent should use.
Not all tools are created equal
The popular external tools, such as CRMs, calendar providers and other services, expose their functionality via APIs.
Most of the AI tool providers, such as Superface, Composio, Zapier, Arcade and others then map these external tools’ APIs into the tools ready for AI (either via MCP or other).
The challenge is: not all of these tools and MCP servers are equal.
What is available?
What it is | Practical use with AI | |
|---|---|---|
1st gen: API connectors | Connectors that mirror the original tool’s API capabilities 1-to-1. | Works only for simple and minimal method calls, such as “list todos”. For complex use cases, AI gets lost on how to use the tools. |
2nd gen: Semantic tools | Built on top of the original tool’s API, but include additional semantic information on how the tool should be used. | Works for intermediate tasks, such as “append new row to spreadsheet” which respects the original sheet format. |
3rd gen: Tool Specialists | Tool-specific agents that plan out and perform tasks on behalf of your agent’s users | Can navigate complex tools and perform advanced tasks without hand holding. |
What about MCP?
MCP calls itself a USB-C for tools, and that’s what it is. Most of the tools we talk about above can be connected via MCP, but MCP itself doesn’t influence the quality of these tools. Think of it as “USB keyboard” and “Bluetooth keyboard”. The way you connect the keyboard changes, but it still is the same keyboard.
How to decide
The easiest (and most fun) way to decide which AI tools work for you the best is to try them out, side-by-side.
We’ve built a playground to do exactly that! The playground is a simple familiar chat interface that lets you interact with multiple tools (such as CRMs or calendars).
You can then switch between various providers of these tools to try out different levels of the tool maturity:
1st gen API connectors: Choose any of the providers for simple connectors
2nd gen Semantic Tools: Choose Superface tools
3rd gen Specialists: Choose Superface Specialists
Try tools in the Playground now!
Do you want to up-skill your AI agents?
We make AI agents more capable, accurate and reliable.
Talk to us if you seek to:
shorten time-to-integration for any number of tools
increase value per agent interaction, with higher goal completion rate
build customer trust using higher reliability