With workflows you can orchestrate your agents. Have them run in the background, in bulk, or on a schedule.
This is the third big bucket of work. Ad hoc? Chat. Recurring or for team work? Build an agent that you can use everywhere. And now, workflows for your key workflows.
Let’s start with a simple example. I have this sales agent that can generate a pipeline report and email it to me if I say “email me a pipeline report.” I can put this on a schedule so the agent sends me this report every Friday at 9 AM.
Let’s go to workflows and create a new workflow. The canvas here is the representation of our workflow, and each step in the workflow is a node.
Let’s bring in our sales agent by going into the node library and selecting Agent under the AI category. I can select our sales agent, the exact agent we had a moment ago, and in the prompt is the message I want to send. “Email me a pipeline report,” just like before.
And if I run this, it’s as if we’ve opened up the agent, wrote the message “email me a pipeline report” without actually opening the agent. It was sent for us. We can see the agent executing the steps in the right panel here and send me that report.
Now, final step is to have this workflow run on a schedule so I don’t have to do anything. To do that I can open up the triggers tab. Triggers are what start your automation. It could be time, or something happened in an application. We’ll cover that in the next example. Select time trigger. I want the report at 9 AM on Fridays, so I’ll generate that trigger. And now this agent will wake up at 9 AM, be asked to send me the report, and boom, it’s in my inbox.
Let’s do something more complicated (but not really): getting ready for meetings, reusing that agent we built in the previous lesson.
What I want now is to wake up this agent 15 minutes before a meeting and ask it to prepare me for my meeting.
Back in the canvas, my trigger in this case will be Google Calendar, and I’ll turn it on as a trigger running 15 minutes before my next meeting. If we just run this on its own, it’s going to get my next calendar invite and all of the information.
We can now wake up our agent and say, “Hey, I’m meeting with someone. Prepare me.” So we want to add our agent as a step in this workflow, just like before. Add in the Agent node and select our meeting prep agent.
My prompt, my message to this agent, is “prepare me for my meeting with” and then right here I want to grab the information from the calendar node. To pass information across nodes is a two-step process. First, I connect the nodes. That makes the information from my calendar node available to use in my agent node. Then you pass it to where it needs to go. In our case, that’s right here in the prompt.
So now if I run this flow to test it, it’s grabbing who I’m meeting with and then passes that to the agent, which gets me prepared for my meeting by going into my CRM and so on.
We’re basically waking the agent 15 minutes before my meeting and saying, “Hey, prepare me for my next meeting.”
That’s how you take an agent and have it run in the background. Pick a trigger, that’s when you want the workflow to start. It could be every Friday at 9 AM, or when a row is added to a Google Sheet. Then wake up your agent, passing the information it needs to run.
And that’s that final type of work: running your agents in the background.
Orchestrating Agents in Workflows
Agents are great in conversation, but the real leverage comes when they run on their own. Workflows let you trigger agents on a schedule or in response to events, so work gets done without you lifting a finger.
You’ve built an agent. It has tools, instructions, and it handles conversations well. But right now, you have to open it up and tell it what to do every time. What if it could just run on its own?
That’s what workflows do. They let you orchestrate your agents so they run in the background, on a schedule, or in response to events happening in your apps.
Three Ways to Work with Agents
At this point you’ve seen the full spectrum:
| Type of work | How you do it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Ad hoc | Chat with your agent | ”Look up this company for me” |
| Recurring / team | Deploy your agent (Slack, web, etc.) | A shared agent your team messages anytime |
| Background | Run your agent in a workflow | Automated pipeline report every Friday at 9 AM |
Workflows unlock the third type. Instead of you telling the agent what to do, the workflow does it for you.
How Workflows Work
A workflow is a series of steps that run automatically. In Gumloop, those steps are represented as nodes on a canvas. Each node does one thing: call an agent, pull data from an app, transform a result, send a message.
Two concepts make workflows useful:
- Triggers are what start your workflow. A trigger could be a schedule (“every Friday at 9 AM”), an event in an app (“a new row was added to this Google Sheet”), or a calendar event (“15 minutes before my next meeting”).
- Connections pass information between nodes. When you connect two nodes, the output of the first becomes available as input to the second. This is how you give your agent the context it needs to do its job.
Example: Automated Pipeline Report
Say you have a sales agent that can generate a pipeline report and email it to you. In chat, you’d type “email me a pipeline report” and the agent handles it. But you want this every Friday morning without thinking about it.
- Create a new workflow and add an Agent node from the node library.
- Select your sales agent and set the prompt to “email me a pipeline report.”
- Add a time trigger set to Fridays at 9 AM.
That’s it. Every Friday, the workflow wakes up your agent, sends the prompt, and the agent does exactly what it would do if you’d typed the message yourself. Report in your inbox, no manual work.
Example: Meeting Prep on Autopilot
Here’s where connections come in. You have a meeting prep agent (from the previous lesson) that researches contacts and sends you a briefing. You want it to run 15 minutes before every meeting.
- Add a Google Calendar trigger set to fire 15 minutes before your next meeting. This pulls the calendar invite details.
- Add an Agent node with your meeting prep agent.
- Connect the calendar node to the agent node. This makes the calendar data (who you’re meeting, the invite details) available to the agent.
- Set the agent’s prompt to “prepare me for my meeting with” and reference the calendar node’s output.
Now the workflow handles the full chain: calendar fires the trigger, passes the meeting details to your agent, and the agent does its research and sends you the briefing. All before you’ve even opened your laptop.
Notice that the agent itself doesn’t change between these examples. The same meeting prep agent works in chat, deployed to Slack, and inside a workflow. What changes is how and when it gets called, and what information it receives.
The Pattern
Every workflow follows the same structure:
- Pick a trigger. When should this run? A schedule, a calendar event, a new row in a spreadsheet, a form submission.
- Add your agent. Drop in an Agent node and select the agent you want to run.
- Connect and pass context. Wire the trigger (or other nodes) to your agent so it has the information it needs.
- Set the prompt. Tell the agent what to do, referencing data from earlier nodes.
Start simple. One trigger, one agent. You can always add more nodes and complexity later as your workflow evolves.