Tutorial: Automate a Weekly Report

In this tutorial, you'll use chat to build a reporting workflow, save it as a playbook, and schedule it to run automatically every week — with a notification sent to your team when it's done.

The scenario

You're on an operations team at a food distribution company. Every Monday morning, your manager wants a summary of the previous week: how many orders were placed, which items are running low, and whether any deliveries failed.

Instead of pulling this together manually, you'll teach the AI to do it once, then automate it.

Step 1: Install the tools you need

Your team has already published custom tools for your systems (see Build a Custom Tool). Make sure these are installed:

1. Go to the Servers panel
2. Click the Private tab
3. Install your order management and inventory tools

If you're using public tools instead, browse the catalog in the Servers panel and install what you need.

Step 2: Build the workflow in chat

Open a new chat and walk the AI through what you want:

"Give me a summary of last week's orders — total count, revenue, and a breakdown by status. Then check for any low-stock items that need reordering. Finally, list any delivery exceptions from the past 7 days."

The AI will call your tools in sequence:

1. Fetch order summary for the date range
2. Check inventory for low-stock items
3. Pull delivery exceptions

Review the output. If you want changes — different date range, different format, additional data — just ask in the same conversation:

"Also include the top 5 customers by order value."

Iterate until the report looks right.

Step 3: Save as a playbook

Once you're happy with the workflow, it gets saved as a playbook automatically. You'll find it in your Playbooks panel.

Open the playbook to verify it captured the right steps. You can set it to Organization visibility so your teammates can run it too.

Step 4: Automate it

1. Open the playbook detail view
2. Click Automate
3. Follow the wizard:

Task — The name and playbook are pre-filled. Add instructions if needed:

"Run this report for the previous Monday–Sunday period. Format the output as a clean summary."

Schedule — Select Weekly, choose Monday, and set the time (e.g., 8:00 AM). Pick your timezone.

Oversight — Toggle Notifications on. Add your manager and team leads as recipients. Set the notification instructions:

"Send the complete report summary when finished. If any data sources are unavailable, notify immediately."

Review — Confirm and create.

Step 5: Monitor

Your automation now runs every Monday at 8 AM. To check on it:

1. Go to the Automations panel
2. Click your automation to see run history
3. Each run shows the full transcript, tool calls, and whether it succeeded

If a run fails — maybe a tool was temporarily unavailable — you'll see the error in the run details and your team will be notified.

Adding approval for actions

If your report should trigger follow-up actions (like creating purchase orders for low-stock items), you can add an approval step:

1. Edit the automation
2. In the Oversight step, toggle Approvals on
3. Under Advanced, select the specific tools that should require approval (e.g., your reorder tool)
4. Add recipients who can approve

Now the AI will pause before placing orders and wait for someone on your team to approve. See Human-in-the-Loop for details.

What you've built

• A reporting workflow created entirely through conversation
• A reusable playbook your whole team can run
• An automation that delivers the report every Monday
• Notifications so your team gets results without logging in
• Optional approval gates for sensitive follow-up actions

This pattern works for any recurring task: daily standups, monthly invoice reconciliation, weekly compliance checks, or nightly data syncs.

Next steps

• Set up your team with roles and approved tools
• Trigger automations via webhook from external events
• Build more custom tools for your internal systems