An agent is only as good as the data it relies on. If it answers from a catalog that was copy-pasted last week, it will eventually quote a wrong price or a stale availability. The fix: connect your data live.
Four ways to connect your data
- Airtable: ideal if your catalog already lives there.
- Google Sheets: the sheet your team keeps up to date, read in real time.
- A file: a simple CSV or Excel import.
- Your API: to plug directly into your existing system.
What it changes
On every question, the agent reads the source in that instant. The stock shown is the real stock. The price is the real price. And every answer cites where the information comes from, so nothing is made up.
You stay in control: update your catalog where you already do, and the agent follows automatically.
Why a copied catalog always drifts
The moment you export your products into a knowledge base, you have created a second version of the truth. It is correct on the day you upload it and slightly wrong every day after. Prices change, a line sells out, a size stops being stocked, a promotion ends.
Nobody notices immediately, because the answers still sound confident. That is the danger. A stale catalog does not produce obvious errors; it produces plausible ones. The customer is told an item is available, orders it, and finds out at fulfilment. You have now spent trust to save a lookup.
What connecting live actually means
It means that when a customer asks about a product, the agent queries the system that owns that fact at that moment, rather than recalling something it was told earlier. Three fields carry most of the value:
- Availability, per variant. Not "in stock" but in stock in that size, that colour, that location.
- Price, including the promotion currently running rather than the one you exported.
- Lead time, because "when will it arrive" is the second question in most buying conversations.
What to connect first
Start with the data that changes fastest and costs the most when wrong. For most retailers that is stock, then price, then delivery windows. Policies and product descriptions can stay as documents, because they change monthly rather than hourly.
You do not need a perfect integration to begin. A read-only connection to the catalog you already maintain covers the majority of questions. The goal is not to replatform. It is to stop answering from memory.
The pitfalls worth knowing
Two failure modes come up repeatedly. The first is caching too aggressively: a five minute cache is fine for descriptions and dangerous for stock on a fast-moving line. The second is answering with certainty when the connection fails. An agent that says "let me confirm that with a colleague" when the lookup times out protects you far better than one that falls back to its last known value and states it as fact.
The test for whether it is working is simple. Change a price in your system, then ask the agent about that product. If the new price comes back, you are connected. If the old one does, you have a copy.
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