Use cases
Seven shapes of work.
Not seven industries — seven shapes. Most businesses recognise themselves in three or four of these at once, which is the point: the same engine runs the invoice, the newsletter, the nightly export and the alert that has to reach three hundred people before six in the morning.
E-commerce and orders
Order to invoice to shipping notice. Abandoned baskets that come back. Stock warnings before the shelf is empty. Returns that start themselves. And the reconciliation nobody wants to do by hand on the first of the month.
Marketing and content
A brief becomes copy, the copy gets a licensed picture, the post goes out on schedule, the numbers come back, and the monthly report writes itself from the numbers rather than from somebody's memory.
Back-office and operations
The nightly reconciliation. The document that has to reach four systems. The approval that has been sitting with somebody since Tuesday. Every task that is currently a person, a spreadsheet and a reminder.
Reference data and enrichment
Thirty-four million rows of public reference data as a step: validate an address, resolve a place to coordinates and a timezone, check a currency before it reaches your accounts package.
Events, alerts and monitoring
Start a workflow because something happened in the world rather than in your database. A severe weather warning. A festival announced. A provider outage. An earthquake.
Media and assets
Royalty-free photography, video and audio from eleven providers, imported with the licence and attribution attached, dropped into whatever the workflow is producing.
Agencies and client work
One workflow, built once, run for thirty clients with thirty sets of credentials — and a monthly report each of them can read without a telephone call to explain it.
None of the above?
Then read the engine instead. The shapes above are patterns we see often, not a list of what is permitted; the product is a sequence of steps and the steps do not care what industry you are in.
What these have in common.
Every one of them is a task somebody is currently doing by hand, on a schedule, in a way that is entirely mechanical but not quite mechanical enough to have been written as software. The invoice always comes from the order, but not always in the same shape. The alert always goes to the crew leads, but not always the same crew leads.
That gap — mechanical, but with a judgment call in the middle — is exactly where a workflow with a few AI steps in it beats both a person and a script. The person is expensive and asleep at four in the morning. The script cannot read an unstructured supplier e-mail. A workflow does the mechanical parts for nothing and spends a fraction of a penny on the two steps that need to think.
- ⚡Something happensA webhook, a schedule, an event in the world, a file appearing.
- 2Facts are gatheredFrom your systems, from reference data, from the thing that fired.
- ?A decisionA rule where a rule is enough; a model where it genuinely is not.
- 4Something is doneWritten, sent, booked, charged, filed, published.
- 5It is written downSo that in six weeks somebody can find out what happened.
Same engine, seven shapesMost people run four of them
Seven shapes of work.
Each is somebody's Tuesday.
Where to start,
honestly.
Not with the biggest thing. Start with the task you do every week that annoys you, and that nobody would notice if it were done at four in the morning instead of at nine. Describe it in a sentence, spend twenty minutes setting the workflow up, simulate it twice, and switch it on.
The second one takes ten minutes, because by then you know what a step looks like. The fourth one is where people usually realise they have stopped thinking of this as a tool and started thinking of it as the place the work happens.
A warning worth reading: do not automate a process you have not decided on. A workflow makes a bad process faster and more consistent, and consistency is exactly what a bad process does not need. If two people in the office do the same job differently and both are sure they are right, that is a conversation to have before you build anything.