What are Products?
Products are the home for your AI Capabilities — your Flows and Agents — and the Surfaces that make them available to the world. Think of a Product as the bridge between what you’ve built and how people use it.
How Products work
A Product bundles related AI Capabilities together and deploys them through one or more Surfaces. Instead of deploying each Flow or Agent individually, you group them into a Product and choose how users interact with them.
Every Product has two key parts:
- Capabilities — The Flows and Agents you want to make available. Each Capability gets a name and optional description, making it easy to organize what your Product can do.
- Surfaces — The channels through which users access your Capabilities. Runtype supports Chat Widgets, REST APIs, MCP Servers, A2A Agents, Slack, and Email, so you can connect directly to the platforms your users already rely on.
Each Surface has its own status (draft, active, or paused) and environment (development or production), so you can test safely before going live.
The environment also controls which credentials a Surface accepts. Development surfaces accept test keys and test client tokens only, so their usage is bounded by test-key caps. Production surfaces accept both live and test credentials. Promote a Surface to production when you’re ready to use live credentials. You can’t move a Surface back to development while it still has active live keys; revoke them first.
Example: Customer Support Product
Maya runs support for a SaaS company and wants to automate common workflows without losing the human touch on complex issues. She creates a Customer Support Product with three Capabilities:
- FAQ answering Flow — Handles common questions using her documentation as context
- Ticket routing Agent — Analyzes incoming requests and assigns them to the right team based on topic and sentiment
- Documentation search Flow — Retrieves relevant help articles when questions go beyond the FAQ
Her customers reach out through different channels, so she adds Surfaces to the same Product:
- Chat Widget — Embedded on her website for instant answers
- REST API — Powers the support interface in her mobile app
- Email channel — Receives support requests and delivers answers directly via email
She sets each Surface to active in the production environment, and her team starts seeing results right away — faster response times and fewer repetitive tickets in the queue. Later, she adds a sentiment analysis Capability to flag frustrated customers for immediate escalation, all within the same Product.
A single Flow or Agent can be added as a Capability in multiple Products. For example, a “summarize text” Flow might be part of your Customer Support Product, your Content Creation Product, and your Research Assistant Product.