AI Profile Templates

AI profile templates are the Orchard Core-friendly way to stamp out repeatable AI profile configurations inside the admin UI and recipes.

The video shows the New AI Profile picker, the profile editor, and how an administrator creates a profile template and starts a profile from it.

Orchard-specific scope

Use profile templates when you want to:

• create reusable Orchard-managed AI profile defaults
• standardize provider, deployment, prompt-template, and capability choices
• generate multiple tenant profiles from a curated template definition

Where to manage them

After enabling the base AI module, Orchard adds:

• Artificial Intelligence -> Templates (permission ManageAIProfileTemplates)

This screen is backed by the Orchard profile-template manager and related display drivers contributed by enabled AI features. The template sources (Profile and System Prompt) are registered by CrestApps.Core. Creating and editing templates in the admin is described in the User Manual under Templates.

Creating a profile from a starting point

Profile templates are how new profiles begin. Instead of opening a single page with every setting, Add Profile opens the New AI Profile picker, asks only what the chosen starting point needs (title, technical name and an optional chat deployment) on a setup step (ProfileWizardController, route ai/profile/new/{templateId}), and creates the profile for you. Everything else stays optional and lives in the usual profile editor. The picker and the setup step are described, with screenshots, in the User Manual under Create a profile.

Because the profile is built from the template itself rather than from the editor's form, every value the template carries reaches the profile, including values that have no field in the editor. Documents attached to the template are copied, so the new profile owns its copies and they are indexed for retrieval. The setup step validates the title, the technical name and the deployment through the profile manager, and shows the setup step again with the error next to the field.

Which templates get a card

The picker builds its cards from the profile templates themselves, so a new template shows up without any extra setup. A card appears for every template that meets all of these:

Rule	Why
Its source is Profile.	System prompt templates fill in instructions; they do not create profiles.
Listable is checked (IsListable: true in a template file, which is the default).	Uncheck Listable on the template to keep it out of the picker.
Its profile type is not Template generated prompt.	Such a profile runs inside an existing chat session rather than standing on its own.

Templates come from every source the site has: the ones created under Artificial Intelligence -> Templates, the files shipped in modules (including the starter scenarios and the building-block agents), and files placed in App_Data. A template created under Artificial Intelligence -> Templates gets a card with its title, description and category; only template files can be featured today (see Featuring your own template).

A template left out of the picker can still create a profile: Artificial Intelligence -> Templates shows a Create profile button on every profile template, for users who can manage AI profiles, and it opens the same setup step.

/Admin/ai/profile/new opens the profiles list with the picker showing, so it can be linked to directly.

Starter scenarios

The AI module ships four featured scenarios:

Scenario	Profile type	Category	Needs
Website assistant	Chat	Talk to people	AI Chat
Answers from your docs	Chat	Talk to people	AI Chat, AI Profile Documents
Guided intake	Chat	Talk to people	AI Chat
Background summarizer	Utility	Do work in the background

After creating Answers from your docs, upload its documents in the editor's Knowledge tab. After creating Guided intake, choose the fields it collects in the Data Extraction card.

Text messaging and phone call starting points

The SMS and automated voice modules ship starting points for conversations the AI holds on its own, over text or on the phone. They are listed after the featured scenarios, under Text messaging and Phone calls, and each one is greyed out until its feature is enabled.

Starting point	Category	Needs	What it does
Qualify leads by text	Text messaging	SMS Omnichannel Automation	Texts people who showed interest and learns what they need, how soon, and who decides, one short question at a time.
Customer care by text	Text messaging	SMS Omnichannel Automation	Answers customers' texts from the facts you give it and gathers what your team needs for anything it cannot resolve.
Answer calls at the front desk	Phone calls	Automated Voice	Answers incoming calls, answers simple questions, takes messages, and transfers callers when a person is available.
Qualify leads by phone	Phone calls	Automated Voice	Calls people who showed interest, checks it is a good time, and learns what they need, how soon, and who decides.
Confirm appointments by phone	Phone calls	Automated Voice	Calls customers to confirm an upcoming appointment and notes cancellations and requests to reschedule.

Every one of them creates a Chat profile with Start the conversation automatically already turned on, because automated SMS conversations and calls only offer profiles that have an opening message. The opening message is the first text, or the greeting on a call, and greets the contact by first name when the contact has one.

After creating one:

• Fill in the About the business section at the end of the system prompt. Until you do, the assistant treats anything still in square brackets as unknown and offers to have the team follow up instead of guessing.
• Add your business name to the Opening message. It starts out generic so that nothing unfinished is ever sent to a customer. It can use Liquid, for example {{ Contact.DisplayText }}, and the appointment starting point is the place to add the appointment's date and time when your subject stores them.
• Choose the profile on the subject flow or the automatic activity load. See Automated AI SMS and Voice.

The prompts leave two things to the platform. Whether the assistant may hand the conversation to a person, and when, comes from the subject's live agent handoff settings, and the platform tells the assistant how to do it only when an agent can actually take the conversation. The platform also tells the assistant how to end a call, and a STOP text opts the contact out before the assistant ever sees it.

The phone starting points do not change the profile's chat mode or name a deployment. An automated call speaks through the telephony provider's speech-to-text and text-to-speech, or as a live speech-to-speech session when the profile's chat deployment can hold one.

Agent starting points for running the site

The Orchard Core AI Agent and Calendars modules ship Agent templates that each own one part of the site. Their cards are greyed out until the features they need are enabled.

Template file	Title	Category	RequiresFeatures	Tools ticked
CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Agent/Templates/Profiles/content-agent.md	Content Agent	Site management	CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Agent, OrchardCore.Contents, OrchardCore.ContentTypes	The Content Management and Content Definitions tools (17)
CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Agent/Templates/Profiles/workflow-agent.md	Workflow Agent	Site management	CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Agent, OrchardCore.Workflows	The Workflow Management tools (4)
CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Agent/Templates/Profiles/ai-operations-agent.md	AI Operations Agent	Site management	CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Agent	The AI Profiles, AI Conversations, AI Quality and AI Analytics tools (10)
CrestApps.OrchardCore.Calendars/Templates/Profiles/calendar-agent.md	Calendar Agent	Calendar	CrestApps.OrchardCore.Calendars	The Calendar and Scheduling tools (10)

Each sets ProfileType: Agent, AgentAvailability: OnDemand and AllowToolInvocation: true, and lists its tools in ToolNames. A tool whose feature is off is skipped when the agent runs, so the Calendar Agent works without Scheduling and simply has no appointment tools. No template ticks the tenant, feature, recipe or settings tools: the tools do not check the caller's permissions (see AI Agents).

Agent templates also accept these keys:

Key	Type	Description
ProfileDescription	string	The agent's description, which the calling model reads to decide when to hand it a job.
AgentAvailability	OnDemand or AlwaysAvailable	Copied to the profile's Availability.
AllowToolInvocation	bool	true turns on Let this agent use its tools. Without it, an agent runs with no tools when another assistant calls it.
ToolNames	string	Comma-separated tool names ticked on the profile's Capabilities tab.
AgentNames	string	Comma-separated agent profile names ticked under Agents.

Featuring your own template

A profile template stored as a file becomes a featured scenario through four front-matter keys. The AI module reads template files from:

• Templates/Profiles/ inside any module
• App_Data/AITemplates/Profiles/, for every tenant
• App_Data/Sites/{tenant}/AITemplates/Profiles/, for one tenant

Key	Type	Description
Featured	bool	true lists the template among the featured scenarios, ahead of the other starting points.
Icon	string	Font Awesome class for the card, for example fa-solid fa-comments.
Order	int	Position within the category. Lower numbers come first, and a category's first scenario decides where the category appears.
RequiresFeatures	string	Comma-separated feature IDs that must be enabled before the scenario can be used.

The card shows the template's Title and Description, and its Category becomes a filter in the picker. An agent's own description, which other agents read, is set with ProfileDescription so that it can differ from the card text.

---
Title: Website assistant
Description: A friendly chat assistant for your site's visitors.
Category: Talk to people
IsListable: true
Featured: true
Icon: fa-solid fa-comments
Order: 1
RequiresFeatures: CrestApps.OrchardCore.AI.Chat
ProfileType: Chat
TitleType: Generated
WelcomeMessage: Hi there! How can I help you today?
---

You are a friendly, helpful assistant on this website.

A value that does not parse, such as a non-numeric Order, is ignored. These keys describe the template only and are never copied onto a profile created from it.

A template file can also give the profile it creates an opening message with the InitialPrompt key. The value becomes the profile's Opening message and turns on Start the conversation automatically. It may use Liquid. A value that starts with a Liquid tag or contains a colon followed by a space must be written as a InitialPrompt: | block, with the text on the next, indented line, so the front matter stays valid YAML.

InitialPrompt: Hi {{ Contact.DisplayText }}, thanks for reaching out! Do you have a minute?

Multi-line values use a Key: | block. The parser trims every continuation line and drops blank lines, so keep a multi-line value such as a Liquid PromptTemplate short and free of meaningful indentation.

Finishing a profile built from a template

A module can adjust a profile built from a template before it is saved by implementing IAIProfileTemplateApplicationHandler. Handlers run once, just before the profile is persisted. They never run while the profile editor is merely prefilled from a template, so a form that is never saved leaves nothing behind.

internal sealed class MyTemplateApplicationHandler : IAIProfileTemplateApplicationHandler
{
    public Task AppliedAsync(AIProfileTemplateAppliedContext context)
    {
        // context.Profile already has its ItemId; context.Template is the template it came from.
        return Task.CompletedTask;
    }
}

Register it with services.AddScoped<IAIProfileTemplateApplicationHandler, MyTemplateApplicationHandler>(). The AI Profile Documents feature uses this hook to replace the template's document references with copies scoped to the new profile.

What can be templated in Orchard

Depending on the enabled features, profile templates can carry Orchard-managed defaults for items such as:

• selected orchestrator
• provider connection and deployment choices
• prompt-template selections
• tool and agent selections
• memory-related options
• chat-specific settings exposed by enabled modules

This makes profile templates the easiest way to standardize new AI profiles for content editors and administrators.

How they fit with recipes

The base AI module registers Orchard recipe support for AI profile templates, so templates can be created and promoted through recipes as part of tenant provisioning or deployment workflows.

Recipe imports use the AIProfileTemplate step. Each imported template item must supply Name, DisplayText, and Source. When ItemId is not provided, Orchard treats the Name + Source pair as the identifier used to locate an existing template before creating a new one.

Shared framework documentation

The underlying profile model and shared profile concepts are documented in CrestApps.Core:

• AI profiles
• AI templates

Related Orchard docs

• AI Services
• AI Prompt Templates
• AI Chat
• AI Chat Interactions