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An automation is one trigger and a sequence of steps. Something happens — a customer writes, a form is submitted, an order is placed — and the steps run in order: send a message, tag the contact, open a deal, call an API, wait a day, then send a follow-up. Automations work on every channel. Some of the events that start them do not belong to a channel at all, and those run wherever the person came from. Flows, by contrast, are WhatsApp-only. See Flows for the difference.

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The shape of an automation

1

A trigger

Exactly one, chosen from the trigger catalogue. It decides when the automation runs and what data the steps can read.
2

A sequence of steps

Run top to bottom. Each step’s result is published to the steps after it, so a later step can build a message or a request out of what an earlier one produced.
3

Branches

A Condition or a Random split owns two sequences of its own — Yes and No. Whichever branch is taken, the parent sequence carries on afterwards.
Because it is a sequence with branches rather than a free graph, the picture on the canvas is always derived from what will actually run. Dragging an arrow from one card to another moves the step; it never draws a connection the engine does not follow.

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The automations list

Automations in the sidebar lists every automation in the workspace as a card: the trigger’s icon and name, the description, a pulsing dot while it is active, and a switch to turn it on and off. Under that sit the trigger’s pill and the channels it is scoped to, and a footer with the number of runs and when it last fired. The actions menu offers Edit, Duplicate, View runs and Delete. Deleting removes the automation and its run history, and cannot be undone.

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Three ways to start

New automation offers three routes, and they are genuinely different starting points rather than steps in a wizard.

Start from scratch

An empty canvas. Pick the trigger and add steps one at a time.

Use a template

A working automation with the copy already written. Anything that names something in your workspace — a tag, a pipeline stage — is left blank and listed up front.

Build with AI

Describe what should happen in a sentence and get a draft on the canvas. It costs AI credits, and nothing is saved until you press Save.

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What happens at run time, and what does not

Almost everything that can go wrong in an automation is silent on purpose:
  • An unknown variable resolves to an empty string rather than being shown to the customer with its braces intact.
  • A step the channel cannot do — a WhatsApp template on Instagram — is skipped, and the rest of the run continues.
  • A step with nobody to send to is skipped for the same reason.
Each of those is the right behaviour in front of a customer and a poor one while you are building, so the editor is loud instead. The checks panel in the editor header lists every one of them before the automation goes live, and the run log records what each step did afterwards. See Diagnostics and logs.
Switching an automation on is the only thing the server refuses outright. It validates every step and returns the first problem it finds — an empty message, a missing tag, a wait of zero.

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Automations, flows and agents

They co-operate: an automation can hand a contact to a flow with the Start flow step, and a flow can hand a conversation to an AI agent or to a human.

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Next

The canvas editor

Adding steps, the inspector, branches, saving and activating.

Triggers

Every trigger, what it supplies, and which ones ignore channel scoping.

Steps

Every step by category, with its settings and what it publishes.

Variables and expressions

Tokens, filters and the empty-value rule.