# Workflows

[Open in workspace →](/workspace/_/ai/workflows)

Workflows control how your AI assistant responds to conversations. A workflow is a sequence of **steps** that your assistant follows: searching your knowledge base, deciding how to respond, routing to the right team, or handing off to a human.

## How a workflow runs

Every conversation is powered by a workflow. When a customer starts a new chat, sends a message, or makes a choice, the workflow picks up from where it left off and works through its steps:

1. A **trigger** fires (new conversation, incoming message, or a timed event).
2. The workflow walks through its steps in order.
3. The workflow pauses until the next trigger.

A simple workflow might search your knowledge base, ask the AI to compose an answer, then send it. A more advanced workflow might first check whether the customer is asking about billing or sales, then route them to a specialist sub-workflow with its own steps and tools.

## What you can do with workflows

- Answer questions from your knowledge base.
- Route conversations to the right team based on the topic (billing, support, bugs, sales).
- Collect information from customers, like their email address, before escalating.
- Hand off to humans when the AI can't help.
- Present choices to customers with clickable options.
- Connect external services like Stripe for billing lookups.

## Getting started

You can start from a **preset** (a ready-made workflow for common scenarios) and customize it, or build a workflow from scratch.

- [Steps](/docs/ai/workflows/steps/) — the building blocks of every workflow.
- [Actions](/docs/ai/workflows/actions/) — concrete operations like reply, search, escalate, and more.
- [Tools](/docs/ai/workflows/tools/) — the actions your AI can choose between inside a prompt step.
- [Presets](/docs/ai/workflows/presets/) — ready-made workflows for support, triage, and sales.
- [Testing](/docs/ai/workflows/testing/) — inspect how workflows handle each message.