Declarative Skills for AI Agents in Knowledge-Grounded Tool-Use Workflows

Abstract

We study orchestration mechanisms for tool-using AI agents in realistic customer-service workflows over an unstructured knowledge base. We argue that declarative agents -- AI agents equipped with natural-language skill files appended to the system prompt -- are an effective orchestration paradigm. Concretely, we compare (i) a DeclarativeAgent that reads three domain-specific skill files at inference time and decides its own control flow, (ii) an ImperativeAgent based on a programmatic state machine with explicit phases, and (iii) an unscaffolded baseline agent modeled after the $\tau$-Knowledge benchmark agent. Our ImperativeAgent is motivated by externalised-control inference as in Recursive Language Models and graph-based orchestration frameworks. We formalise the three agents as policy classes within a decentralised partially-observable Markov decision process and analyse their information-theoretic and structural properties; we then test the predicted differences empirically on five language models and two retrieval regimes. Our results show that retrieval quality is a dominant bottleneck for AI agents: when evidence is incomplete or skewed, all agents degrade substantially, and skill files cannot recover lost performance. Under high-quality retrieval, however, declarative skills consistently improve accuracy on procedural tasks and reduce orchestration errors, while the imperative state machine's brittleness does not reliably improve task success or compliance.