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Draft a workflow with AI

Pro plan Owner, Admin, or Portfolio Manager

You do not have to assemble a workflow step by step. Describe what should happen in a sentence, and the AI drafts the steps onto the canvas of the workflow builder. You then review the actual steps, fix anything it flagged, and press Save, the same Save you would have used anyway. The draft itself saves nothing.

Draft the steps

Section titled “Draft the steps”

  1. Open Workflows in the sidebar and select New Workflow. On the template gallery, choose Describe it instead. (On an existing workflow, the same panel sits below the workflow’s details card.)

  2. Pick the trigger first if the current one is not what you want. The AI drafts the steps that follow the workflow’s trigger; describing a different trigger in your sentence does not change the trigger control.

  3. Describe what should happen, for example: When a task becomes overdue, wait a day, then comment on it and email me. Select Draft the steps.

  4. Read Here is what that would do. This readback is rendered from the drafted steps themselves, not from what the model claims it wrote, so it describes exactly what would run.

  5. Select Put this on the canvas. The steps land in the builder as ordinary steps, every one open to editing.

  6. Check the steps over, fix anything flagged (below), then press Save.

What the warnings mean

Section titled “What the warnings mean”

The draft can arrive with cautions, and they stay on screen after you place the graph, because that is the moment you can act on them:

  • An unresolved reference arrives empty, not wrong. If your description names a person, sprint, list, or other thing the AI cannot confidently match to something that already exists in your workspace, it does not guess. The step lands with that field empty and the caution names it, so fill it in on the canvas before saving. The AI only ever picks from what already exists; it never invents a name.
  • A change to an existing workflow that removes a step, or adds one that reaches outside Onplana (a webhook, or an email to an outside address), is called out separately so you notice it before saving.

A refusal is also specific: if the draft would contain steps that could never run, drafting fails with one issue per line rather than handing you a broken workflow.

What drafting will never do

Section titled “What drafting will never do”
  • It saves nothing. The only write is the builder’s Save button, after you have seen the real steps on the canvas.
  • It never turns a workflow on or off. Activation stays a decision you make on the workflow itself.
  • Only drafting spends AI tokens. Generating a draft draws on your AI token budget; placing and saving it costs nothing further.

For agents

Section titled “For agents”

Connected agents can design workflows through the design_workflow_draft tool: generating returns the same readback and graph a person sees, and saving a graph always requires an explicit acknowledgement after reading the diff. An agent cannot activate a workflow through this tool at all, so anything an agent saves stays off until a person turns it on.

FAQs

Section titled “FAQs”

Why was my draft refused? The usual reasons: the description was too vague to act on, it asked for something no available step can do, your workspace’s AI token budget is used up, or you hit the drafting rate limit. The refusal says which. You can always build the same workflow by hand in the meantime.

Does the readback update when I edit the steps? No. It described the draft as generated. Once the steps are on the canvas, the canvas is the truth, which is why the review happens there.

Which plan do I need? The workflow builder, including this panel, is Pro and above. The simpler describe-and-pick box for app automations in the Build panel works on every plan.

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