Agent effort
Control the agent's reasoning depth to balance quality and speed.
Nios uses specialized agents for different tasks: creating products, updating bill of materials, comparing impacts, and answering questions. Each agent is optimized for its task with a dedicated intelligence configuration.
The Agent effort dropdown lets you tune this configuration per message. A higher effort level increases the depth of reasoning the agent applies, regardless of which specialized agent handles your task.
Effort levels
- Medium (default): The recommended level for most tasks. Provides the best balance of reasoning quality and response speed for product creation, impact analysis, and standard comparisons.
- Low: Optimized for speed. Best for simple factual questions and quick data lookups where deep reasoning is not needed.
- High: Activates the most capable intelligence configuration with extended thinking. Best for breaking down very complex products in bill of materials, or performing detailed value chain comparisons. Expect roughly twice the response time.
Start with Medium. Switch to High when you need the agent to reason through complex trade-offs or edge cases, and to Low for quick lookups.
Agent effort controls reasoning depth (how hard the agent thinks). Chat modes control behavioral scope (what the agent can do). These are independent controls that work together.