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Tools Overview

Tools overview

Tools are the core product on Rival.

Everything on the platform - discovering, executing, building, publishing, and monetizing - revolves around tools. A tool represents a unit of functionality that can be executed on-demand, exposed via APIs, or shared with other users through the marketplace.

Tool types

Rival currently supports three active tool types.

Function

A Function is a standard AI-powered execution unit.

You define:

  • Inputs
  • Logic or prompt
  • Model or runtime

Rival exposes it as a callable endpoint.

Functions are the most commonly used tool type and cover a wide range of use cases:

  • Text processing and generation
  • Classification
  • Data transformation
  • Analysis
  • Automation workflows

MCP

MCP tools follow the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard.

They are designed to act as context providers or action layers within AI agent workflows.

Instead of being directly executed by users, MCP tools are typically used by:

  • AI agents
  • IDE assistants
  • External systems

MCP is the right choice when:

  • You want AI systems to interact with your tool
  • You are building agent-based workflows
  • Your tool needs to expose structured capabilities

Storm

Storm is Rival’s intelligent content tagging engine.

It is designed to process unstructured data and map it to a predefined taxonomy using a reference document called a topic file.

How Storm works

The workflow is simple:

  1. Upload a topic file
    Defines the taxonomy - categories, labels, or classification logic.

  2. Send incoming content
    Provide files, documents, or text to be processed.

  3. Receive tagged output
    Storm analyzes the content and applies tags based on the topic file.

Storm is optimized for:

  • Content classification
  • Metadata extraction
  • Large-scale tagging workflows
  • Dataset preparation for AI systems