Flows

A flow is one of your business processes, written down in plain English and compiled into software. The hundredth run follows the same steps in the same order as the first, calls on an agent wherever the process needs judgement rather than a rule, stops and waits wherever the process says a person decides, and leaves a record of everything it did.

Flows are early access. They work, and they are still being finished, so give a new one a few supervised runs before you rely on it for anything you cannot afford to go wrong.

How one comes to exist

It begins as a conversation. You say what you want and your agent asks the questions a new starter would ask: what sets this off, what usually happens, what to do when it does not, and where you want to be asked before anything goes out. What comes back is a description in ordinary business words that you should read and recognise as your own process. There is no form to fill in.

That description is then checked for the gaps that would trip it up, and compiled. Compiling takes a while and happens in the background.

A build is not the finish line. You test the flow on your own real cases and confirm both the decision it made and what actually happened at the other end. Every correction you give is written down beside the process, so rebuilding honours it rather than arguing the point again. Once your real cases behave, the flow can be run: on demand, on a schedule, when a message arrives on one of your channels, or on an event from an outside system you have connected.

Write your first flow walks through all of that once.

Three shapes

Most flows are a fixed sequence: the steps and branches are settled when it is compiled and every run takes the same path, which is what you want for anything you may have to account for later.

Some are a sequence the AI walks step by step, doing the thinking at each step while the order is held for it, so it cannot run ahead or skip.

The third is a conversation the AI leads over a durable backbone that delivers each message, keeps one person's replies apart from another's, and holds the thread together for as long as the exchange takes. The library shows each flow's shape as a badge: state machine for the fixed sequence, llm-stepped for the one the AI walks step by step, and agent for the conversation it leads.

Something simpler, one instruction on a clock or an eye kept on a page, is a scheduled task or a watcher; a flow is for when there is an order to it, rules, approvals or several people. A flow can also hand heavy work to a job and carry on when the job is done.

What the Flows pages show

Flows live under Automations > Flows (/manage/flows), across four tabs.

Library lists every flow you have with its triggers, its latest build and its number of steps. From a row you can run the latest build, which asks you for any details the flow expects; open the flow in a chat to change it; switch a trigger on or off; or fire one as a test rather than waiting for the real thing. A Disable all button stops every trigger at once.

Runs is the history: active, completed or failed, searchable, with a live count in the sidebar and a cancel on anything still running.

Open a run and the process is drawn as a map with the current step lit up, beside what went in, what came out, and a log of every step, decision, retry and question in order. Click an event and the map moves to the step it belongs to. It updates live, so you can watch one work. Your agent can also put that map in the preview pane beside the chat while you talk a flow over.

Providers lists the outside sources you have connected, what each has seen lately and whether it is switched on; on this page a provider means one of those sources, not an AI provider. Configs holds the settings a flow or a source needs, such as which inbox counts as the support inbox.

When a run asks you

Where the process says you decide, the run pauses and the question comes to you on the channel you already use, in ordinary words. You answer in ordinary words too.

The run picks up from exactly the step it stopped at, whether you reply in ten minutes or in three days, and it can pause more than once on the way through. Until you answer it sits in the list as suspended rather than finished, so nothing is lost while it waits for you.