General Bots: Open-source AI agent platform for self-hosted enterprise automation

What General Bots is

General Bots is an open-source, self-hostable AI agent platform that started as a side project in 2019 by a small group in Brazil. The original concept was to create a single platform where AI could operate inside companies, avoiding the need to stitch together separate chatbots, automations, dashboards, documents, APIs, and AI models.

Key features and components

The platform has accumulated several components over years of development:

• AI agents that execute workflows
• Conversational interfaces over documents and company data
• Knowledge bases and vector search
• Automation pipelines
• CRM-style customer interactions
• Omnichannel messaging
• Document processing (including PDFs)
• Collaboration tools
• Integrations with APIs and internal systems
• Support for different LLM providers

The system can run with different AI models, including local ones, and is designed to avoid vendor lock-in. According to the developers, some features that are now considered "new AI features" were already built into General Bots years ago.

Target use cases

This approach makes General Bots particularly suitable for organizations where sending company data to external AI services isn't always possible, such as governments, regulated industries, or any organization wanting full control over their infrastructure.

The project is available on GitHub at https://github.com/GeneralBots and includes comparison materials showing work-in-progress tools compared to Microsoft 365 functionality.