Build an AI Agent in React Native Using OpenAI and Kommunicate
The global conversational AI agents market is expanding fast. It was worth $11.6B in 2024 and projected to grow at a 20–25% CAGR over the next decade. OpenAI holds a dominant share of attention, with ChatGPT capturing nearly 80% of all AI‑tool traffic. These two facts make one obvious: if you’re embedding a conversational AI agent inside your mobile app, integrating with OpenAI is the smart bet.
Similarly, React Native remains one of the quickest ways to ship a high-quality, cross‑platform mobile experience with a single codebase. If your product strategy includes an AI agent inside your iOS and Android apps, then learning to wire OpenAI into React Native is essential.
This tutorial will show you how to add OpenAI-powered conversational AI agents to your React Native app using Kommunicate. Kommunicate will act as the plug‑and‑play UI and orchestration layer: it renders the chat interface natively, logs user sessions, manages conversation histories, supports agent-to-agent (AI → human) handoffs, and gives you production-grade controls without additional custom UI code.
First, let’s understand why we’re using Kommunicate in the first place.
What are the Benefits of Integrating OpenAI with React Native with Kommunicate?
Pairing OpenAI’s models with Kommunicate’s React Native SDK lets you ship a secure, production‑ready conversational agent without building chat UI, orchestration, or handoffs from scratch. The benefits you get are:
The Kommunicate SDK is the easiest and quickest way to bring a conversational AI agent to your React Native app. Let’s see how you can use the product.
Pre-Requisites
Here’s what you will need to get started:
Step 1: Create a Conversational OpenAI AI Agent with Kommunicate
2. You will see the conversational AI agents you’ve already created in Agent Integrations. We will create a new AI agent for this tutorial by clicking Create New Agent.
3. When you click Create new Agent, Kommunicate will let you integrate your agent with different foundational models and bot builders. We will choose the OpenAI integration.
4. Choose the AI model that will be the backbone of your AI agent. We’re choosing 4-o-mini because smaller AI models give customers faster responses. We’re also choosing 1000 as the max token number (the length of the answer the agent will give) and the temperature as 0 (This ensures that the agent derives facts directly from our documents without adding extra creativity). Once done, click on Save and Proceed.
5. After saving, you’ll have to name your chatbot. We’re naming our AI agent React_Bot and using a standard avatar (You can also use your custom avatar for the agent).
6. You’ll be asked whether you want to enable Human Handoff. We recommend enabling this feature to have human-in-the-loop conversations with your customers.
7. Your OpenAI conversational AI agent is ready! Click on Let this bot handle all conversations so that this AI agent can be directly integrated with React Native.
After this, you can train this conversational AI agent to have more detailed, on-brand conversations. You can use FAQs, documents, and URLs to create better AI agents.
You can find the details on how to train your AI agent in this article.
Now that we have a functioning AI agent, let’s add it to our React Native app.
Step 2: Connect Your React Native App to Kommunicate SDK
1. Add the Kommunicate module to your React Native app using npm
npm install react-native-kommunicate-chat --save
2. Add the Kommunicate app to your project. Navigate to app.js and type the following command.
var RNKommunicateChat = NativeModules.RNKommunicateChat;
3. Now, let’s create the chat widget that will open inside your app.
import React, { useCallback } from 'react';
import {
SafeAreaView,
ScrollView,
StatusBar,
useColorScheme,
View,
Text,
Button,
StyleSheet,
} from 'react-native';
import { Colors, Header } from 'react-native/Libraries/NewAppScreen';
import RNKommunicateChat from 'react-native-kommunicate-chat';
const APP_ID = 'APP_ID'; // replace with your own if needed
const App = () => {
const isDarkMode = useColorScheme() === 'dark';
const backgroundStyle = {
backgroundColor: isDarkMode ? Colors.darker : Colors.lighter,
};
const startConversation = useCallback(() => {
const conversationObject = {
appId: APP_ID, // obtained from Kommunicate dashboard
};
RNKommunicateChat.buildConversation(
conversationObject,
(response, responseMessage) => {
if (response === 'Success') {
console.log('Conversation successfully created with id:', responseMessage);
} else {
console.warn('Conversation failed:', responseMessage);
}
}
);
}, []);
return (
<SafeAreaView style={styles.con}>
<StatusBar
barStyle={isDarkMode ? 'light-content' : 'dark-content'}
backgroundColor={backgroundStyle.backgroundColor}
/>
<ScrollView
contentInsetAdjustmentBehavior="automatic"
style={backgroundStyle}
>
<Header />
<View
style={{
backgroundColor: isDarkMode ? Colors.black : Colors.white,
}}
>
<Text style={styles.title}>Here you can talk with our customer support.</Text>
<View style={styles.container}>
<Button title="Start conversation" onPress={startConversation} />
</View>
</View>
</ScrollView>
</SafeAreaView>
);
};
const styles = StyleSheet.create({
con: { flex: 1 },
container: { padding: 16 },
title: { fontSize: 18, fontWeight: '600', marginVertical: 8 },
});
export default App;
Note for iOS (React Native Enabled Applications)
Our iOS SDK is currently not compatible with React Native’s New Architecture (Fabric). To avoid build issues, please disable the new architecture before running pod install.
Option 1: Update your Podfile
At the very top of your iOS Podfile, add:
ENV['RCT_NEW_ARCH_ENABLED'] = '0'
Connect the conversation OpenAI agent you created. Replace the APP_ID in the previous code with the App ID you get from the Install page under Settings.
That’s it! Your React Native app can use an OpenAI AI agent with the Kommunicate SDK.
Parting Thoughts
OpenAI gives you the reasoning engine, React Native gives you a single codebase for iOS and Android, and Kommunicate supplies the production‑ready UI, orchestration, analytics, and human handoff you don’t want to rebuild. In a few lines of code, you stood up a cross‑platform conversational agent that’s secure, observable, and easy to iterate.
Want help shipping a production-grade mobile AI agent faster? Book a demo with Kommunicate!