Build and run Flows
Flows automate what happens after a message arrives. A flow has a trigger, which is what starts it, and one or more steps, which are what it does.
Some stay simple: label mail from one sender, forward invoices to finance, send yourself a summary of what went unread. A step can also be an agent that decides for itself which tools to use to finish a job:
- Answer a pricing question by pulling your own price sheet out of the Brain, so the reply matches what your team agreed rather than what a model guesses
- Watch for competitor news, research what actually changed, and write it into a Brain page that becomes a history you can read back over months
- Read the decisions that get made in your Slack channels and propose Brain updates from them, with an approval gate so nothing lands until a person says yes
- Delegate the job to one of your own agents, and let it split the work across specialists that run at the same time, one checking the calendar while another drafts the reply
- Turn a customer request into a DoBox task with the thread attached, so whoever picks it up has the history already
Starting a flow
Triggers come from the places your work already happens: an email arriving that matches a sender, a domain, a label or a category; a Slack message in a channel you name; something changing in your DoBox, like a task being created or a comment being added. A flow can also run on a schedule when you want it to check something rather than wait for it.
Building one
Three ways in, and they end up in the same place:
- Describe what you want in plain language and let the assistant build it
- Start from a template in the Discover tab and edit it
- Build it step by step yourself
Steps can read your Brain, write to it, send a message, create or update a task, touch your calendar, update a contact, or call out to a tool you’ve connected. Connect MCP servers from the Integrations page to give flows access to things outside this+that.
An agent step is the one worth knowing about. Instead of naming each action, you give it a goal and the tool sets it may use, and it decides the rest. Give it the Brain read-only and it answers from what your team has written down; give it Brain read and write and it maintains those pages itself. Point the step at one of the agents you have built and the flow delegates the whole job to it, and that agent can hand independent pieces to specialists that run in parallel.
An approval gate pauses the flow until a person approves what it wants to do, which is what makes the ambitious ones safe to leave running.
Keeping them under control
Deactivate a flow from the ⋮ menu on the Flows page. It stops running and stays where it is, so you can switch it back on later. When a job needs more than one flow, group several into a workflow that handles it end to end.