Custom Skills shipped in March as a way to make the AI agent act, not just answer. You could trigger tags, create tickets, hand out discount codes, route conversations. Everything happened inside Text.
Today that boundary lifts. Custom Skills can now call any external service through a webhook. If a system you run exposes an HTTP endpoint, the AI agent can hit it in the middle of a conversation, parse the response, and use the result to keep the chat going.
What this unlocks
The agent can pull context from systems Text doesn't host. Query your CRM, a Notion knowledge base, an internal product database, whatever owns the answer the customer is asking about.
It can connect to discount and coupon services. The agent checks eligibility against your rules, not ours, and only offers the code if the customer qualifies.
It can check backend state live. Order status, stock levels, subscription tier, account standing, fetched from the system that actually knows.
And it can write data back. Capture a lead into a CDP, open a ticket in another system, update a record. The conversation stops being a dead end for data and starts being an input.
Real examples from the rollout
A large retailer was the first customer to put this into production. Their loyalty program has a dedicated endpoint that checks whether a chatting customer qualifies for a discount. The AI agent calls that endpoint live, gets a yes or no, and responds accordingly. The same pattern works for any program where eligibility lives outside your support stack.
Inside Text, the first day produced a flurry of working prototypes. A teammate stood up a service status checker on text.com in under two minutes. Another wired a delivery-status flow that pulls from a Notion database, and it worked on the first try. A third built a Calendly demo skill. A visitor types "I'd like to book a demo, my name is X, email is Y," and the skill fetches available slots from Calendly and books one without anyone leaving the chat.
Why this matters for revenue
Text's AI agent already converts chatting visitors to orders at 266% higher rates than browse-only visitors. Webhooks widen the inputs the agent has to act on. The agent can now check a coupon eligibility rule that lives in your finance team's spreadsheet, return a stock answer that depends on a warehouse system Text has never seen, or hand a qualified lead straight into the CRM your sales team works in.
Built-in skills, the Shopify integration, and Workflows already cover the common cases. Webhooks cover the cases that are specific to you, which is most of the interesting ones.
Available now
Webhooks are live inside the Custom Skills builder today. No flag, no waitlist. If you already use Custom Skills, the new action shows up next to the built-in ones.
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