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Rival Enterprise

Workflows

A workflow is an automated, multi-step process — the workhorse of Operational AI. Where an agent is a worker, a workflow is a defined process that runs the same way every time, with the checkpoints your organization requires built in.

Anatomy of a workflow

Section titled “Anatomy of a workflow”

Every workflow is made of a few parts:

  • Trigger — what starts it. A schedule, an event in a connected system, or a person kicking it off.
  • Actions — the steps it performs, using tools and connected data.
  • Decision logic — branches that let the workflow respond to what it finds.
  • Approvals — points where a human reviews and signs off before the workflow continues.
  • Monitoring — visibility into what’s running, what’s finished, and what needs attention.

Ownership

Section titled “Ownership”

Every enterprise workflow has an owner — a person accountable for it. Ownership is what keeps a growing library of automations from becoming a mystery: there’s always someone who knows why a workflow exists and can change it.

Approvals are the point

Section titled “Approvals are the point”

The reason workflows are safe to run at enterprise scale is that approval steps are part of the design, not an afterthought. A workflow can do ten things automatically and still stop at the eleventh — the one that spends money, sends something external, or touches sensitive data — and wait for a human. See Approval workflows.

Common enterprise workflows

Section titled “Common enterprise workflows”

Typical starting points include onboarding and offboarding steps, routing and triage of incoming requests, report generation, data syncs between systems, and multi-step approvals. See worked examples in Common enterprise workflows.

Section titled “Related”