Add subagents to a Rovo agent
Terminology used in this article
Subagents: the tools, skills, knowledge, and instructions you provide your agent in specific situations
Instructions: the prompt that defines your agent's goals and purpose. Your agent uses its instructions when responding to prompts.
Custom trigger: The situation or user sentiment that, when matched to a prompt, will run a subagents.
Adding subagents to an agent can help you make more complex and powerful agents to accomplish a variety of tasks.
While it’s typically recommended for an agent to have quite a specific purpose, when you start creating an agent, you might have in mind ways that it can help its users in different situations or with different tasks. You can add subagents to your agent to help provide separate sets of instructions that prompt your agent to behave a certain way or perform particular tasks.
Creating and Managing subagents for your Agent
Subagents are optional, task-focused helpers that can have their own instructions, routing description, knowledge, and tools. They’re useful when your agent needs to handle distinct jobs that benefit from specialized guidance.
For example, you might create:
A support-focused subagent that answers product questions from documentation
A planning-focused subagent that turns a request into a structured project plan
A reporting-focused subagent that summarizes recent work or updates
The important part: the main agent can fan out work to multiple subagents simultaneously within a single turn when helpful (just like a skill), unlocking richer, multi-domain answers without extra setup.
Each subagent gets its own context window, only the main agent's delegated info, and conversation history enter it. Subagents also only return summarized results, without all of the internal skill outputs, keeping the main agent's context clean and concise.
Add a subagent to an agent
Navigate to the Atlassian Studio app in the app switcher.
Select Agents from the left-side navigation to see a list of the agents you’ve created.
Choose the agent you’d like to edit
In the Details tab, select Add subagent.
Provide a name for the subagent so you and any collaborators can identify it easily and understand its purpose.
Write a trigger for the subagent by prompting the agent on when it should run the subagent.
Add the instructions, tools, skills, and knowledge you’d like the agent to use in this subagent.
When you’re finished designing the subagent, select Save.
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