Steps & actions

The building blocks of a workflow — control-flow steps, the action catalogue, and the AI Worker step with its guardrails.

Inside the Studio, you build a workflow from two families of steps: control-flow steps that shape the path, and actions that do something. The most powerful action is the AI Worker step, which does the reasoning and messaging.

Control-flow steps

These steps branch, pause, or redirect the flow.

Step	What it does
If / Else	Branch on a condition (field, tag, channel…). Creates a Yes and an Else path. Operators: is, is not, contains, greater than, less than.
Split	A/B split contacts across paths by ratio (default 50/50). Sticky per contact, so a contact always takes the same side.
Wait	Pause the run — for a duration, until a date, for an event, or until the contact replies.
Wait for approval	Pause until a teammate approves or rejects, with a timeout. Creates an Approved and a Rejected path. See Approvals & escalations.
Go to	Jump the contact to another step in the same workflow.

A Go to that loops back with no exit is blocked at publish time. Add an If / Else or Split so the contact has a way out of the loop.

Actions

Actions are grouped in the step picker:

Group	Actions
Records & CRM	Create record, Update record, Update field, Move stage / status, Delete record, Add / remove tag, Add note, Create task, Find / lookup record, Math operation, Format date / time, Format text
Communication	Send SMS, Send email, Call, Send fax — each sent to the enrolled contact or a custom value
Routing & people	Assign / route (user, round-robin, or team), Internal notify (in-app / email / SMS), Contact Centre handoff
Scheduling	Appointment — book, reschedule, cancel, or send a booking link
Compliance	Consent / opt-out — mark opt-out, update consent, or suppress from sends
Integrations & custom	Outbound webhook (POST / PUT / GET, with headers and a JSON payload)
Workforce flow	Add to Workforce (honours its re-entry rules), Remove from Workforce (cancels its runs)
AI	AI Worker — hand off to an agentic AI Worker to drive an outcome

Metered actions. Send SMS, Call, Send fax, and the AI Worker step consume usage and appear in your ROI dashboard and billing. Send email and outbound webhooks are not metered.

Sticky notes

Add Sticky notes from the left toolbar to annotate the canvas for your teammates. They’re not part of the flow and never block publishing.

The AI Worker step

The AI Worker step is an agentic step: given plain-language instructions, it reasons over the contact’s context and drives an outcome on a channel. Add it from the AI group in the step picker, then configure it.

Safe by default. An unconfigured worker has no tools and can’t change any record. It gains abilities only from what you grant below — and those limits are enforced on the server, not just in the app.

Choose a worker type

Type	Does
SMS Worker	Converse over SMS to drive an outcome.
Email Worker	Handle an email thread and reply in context.
Voice Worker	Place or take a call via the voice agent.
Task Worker	A general reasoning step with no channel.

Instructions and model

• Instructions — a plain-language objective. The Enhance button scaffolds an Objective / Guidelines / Success-looks-like structure for you.
• Model — choose the reasoning model:
  • Claude Opus 4.8 — most capable, for the hardest reasoning
  • Claude Sonnet 5 — balanced; the sensible default
  • Claude Haiku 4.5 — fastest and cheapest, for simple tasks
• Tone (optional) — how the worker should come across.

Voice Workers also set a Persona, Voice, and Language, and link a voice agent with a calling number (use Sync voice agent to provision it).

Grant tools and write-back

• Tools — the worker can only use the actions you tick here. Nothing is granted by default.
• Field write-back — the only record fields the worker may change. For each field, choose AI decides the value or You set a fixed value. A fixed value can’t be changed even by a jailbroken worker.

Guardrails

Guardrails are on by default — every worker must have a way to hand off to a human:

Guardrail	What it does
Max steps per run	A hard ceiling on the worker’s reasoning/tool turns (default 6).
Escalate to a human when…	Required. The condition that hands the run off to a person.
Usage cap per run	Optional — stop the run after this much spend. Blank = no cap.
Quiet hours	No outbound contact in this window (default 21:00–08:00). Not for Task Workers.
AI disclosure	Required for Voice Workers — spoken at the start of the call (EU AI Act, Art. 50).

Practice mode vs. live

Perform actions for real is off by default. While it’s off, the worker only records what it would do — nothing is sent or changed, which is ideal while you’re configuring. Turn it on only when you’re ready:

With Perform actions for real on, the worker runs its granted actions for real: CRM changes apply immediately and outbound messages are queued for sending. Test it first.

You can Test a worker against a sample message right from its panel before saving. Incomplete workers can still be saved, but publishing is blocked until required fields (like instructions and an escalation condition) are set.