Building Custom Workflows

What is a custom workflow?

A custom workflow is a reusable AI workflow you define yourself. You describe the job you want done in plain language, SoterAI turns it into an ordered set of steps, and once you save it the workflow appears on your own Workflows page, ready to run with a single click. It starts out visible only to you — when you want colleagues to be able to use it, you share it with one or more workspaces. See Sharing your workflow below.

Examples of what you could build:

• Translate a document from Spanish to English following your company style guide
• Summarize a site inspection report into a 5-point executive briefing
• Generate a toolbox talk from a list of hazards identified on-site
• Draft a corrective action plan from an incident description
• Take actions in other tools — workflows can send emails, post to Slack, or create tickets in another system, if the connection type allows it
• Pull live data from systems outside SoterAI — workflows can connect to other apps in your workspace and read live data from them

Examples of what custom workflows aren't designed for:

• Monitor your connected apps in the background — for example, a workflow can't scan your Gmail for high-priority messages or pull decisions and attendees out of a Google Drive meeting note on its own
• Chain multiple workflows together or branch on conditional logic — each workflow is a single self-contained task

Who can create custom workflows?

Custom workflows can be created by Owners, Managers, and Users. Read-Only and Actions Access users cannot create, edit or run any workflow that has been shared with the workspace.

How the builder works

The Custom Workflow Builder is a split screen. The chat on the left is where you do all the work: you describe the job, answer questions, and ask for changes. The Workflow Map on the right is a read-only picture of what SoterAI has built for you — you can look at it and point at it, but you cannot type into it.

For a full tour of the map — the step cards, the resources each step uses, and how to scope an edit — see Understanding the Workflow Map.

Creating a custom workflow

Step 1 — Open the workflow builder

Go to the Workflows page in the sidebar. There are two ways to start — both open the same builder:

• Select New Custom Workflow in the top-right corner of the page, or
• Select Create Now on the Create a Workflow card in the Quick Start section of the My Workflows tab.

Both buttons show Launching… for a moment while SoterAI prepares your workflow, then the builder opens with the chat on the left and the Workflow Map on the right.

Step 2 — Describe the job in the chat

SoterAI sets up your workflow when the builder opens — you will see it check the available record types, read the Custom Workflows schema, create a draft, and fetch your workspace locations. It then invites you to begin, with a few worked examples such as:

"Every morning, search for the latest OSHA news and summarize the top 3 stories."

"When I upload a photo, analyze it for workplace hazards and generate a report."

"Review uploaded incident reports, extract key details, and create a summary table."

Describe what you want in your own words — what the job is, what a good result looks like, and anything the workflow must always do. You do not need to think in steps, prompts or connectors; that is SoterAI's job.

You can attach evidence at this point too — documents, PDFs, images and any other file type the chat already supports. Upload, microphone and connector controls all work as they do elsewhere in chat.

Tip: The more specific your description, the better the result. Mention your industry, the format you want the output in, and any constraints to follow.

Step 3 — Let SoterAI build the workflow

Once you have described the job, SoterAI drafts the instructions and populates the Workflow Map — the title, description, instructions, any attachments, a schedule if you asked for one, and the ordered steps. If it needs anything essential to produce a credible workflow, it asks in the chat first; otherwise it builds straight away and shows you the result.

You do not have to get everything right in one message. Once the map is built you can refine any part of it by selecting that field or step and describing the change — see Step 4.

Step 4 — Review and refine the Workflow Map

When the build finishes, the right-hand panel shows your workflow:

Read through it and check it matches how the work should actually happen. If something is wrong, click that field or step and describe the change in the chat. For a full tour of the map, see Understanding the Workflow Map.

Step 5 — Test it, then save

Once the map has a title, instructions and at least one valid step, Test and Save workflow appear in an action bar pinned to the bottom of the map.

Test runs the workflow for real against a sample input and reports progress in the chat. When it finishes, SoterAI summarizes what happened and may propose improvements — nothing is applied until you say so. You can test as many times as you like, adjusting the workflow in between.

When you are satisfied, click Save workflow. The workflow appears as a card in the Custom Workflows group on your My Workflows tab. At this point it is yours alone — colleagues in your workspace cannot see it or run it. To let them use it, share it (see below).

If you navigate away after building or changing a workflow you have not saved, SoterAI warns you before discarding the session and offers Keep editing or Discard changes. There is no autosave and no saved draft, so the warning is your only safety net.

Sharing your workflow

A saved workflow is private to you until you share it. Open the ⋮ menu on the workflow card and choose Share, then pick who should be able to use it:

• Specific workspaces — tick any workspace in your organization. Your own workspace is one of the options, badged This workspace — tick it so colleagues where you built the workflow can find it.
• Entire organization — one toggle that offers the workflow to every workspace's Library.

In each workspace you share with, the workflow turns up in the Library's Shared with you sub-tab with an Add button. It does not land on anyone's My Workflows tab automatically — each person adds it for themselves. If you later untick a workspace, the workflow disappears for everyone there, including from the tabs of people who had added it.

Unticking a workspace is the clean way to withdraw a workflow from a team. Archiving is not the same thing — see Editing and archiving a published workflow below.

For the full picture, see Custom Workflows: Lifecycle Management.

Finding and running a custom workflow

Your own custom workflows appear in the Custom Workflows group on the My Workflows tab of the Workflows page. Workflows a colleague has shared with your workspace appear in the Library under Shared with you — click Add on the card to put one on your My Workflows tab.

Select Use Now on a workflow card to start a conversation — SoterAI will automatically load the workflow's prompt as the starting context, so you can get straight to the task. The ⓘ button next to it shows the workflow's details.

If your workflow accepts files as inputs, users can upload files when running it. Those files are indexed and fully readable by the AI — SoterAI can extract text, analyze content, and reference specific details from any uploaded file as part of the workflow output.

Scheduling a workflow

As well as running a custom workflow on demand, you can set it to run automatically on a defined schedule — hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or on a custom (advanced) cadence. Use Set Schedule in the ⋮ menu on the workflow card, or set it in the same panel you use to create or edit the workflow; the schedule you set is shown on the Schedule row of the Workflow Map. Schedules run in your own timezone. Scheduling is available on custom workflows only; pre-built Library workflows must be cloned first.

For step-by-step instructions, see Scheduling Workflows.

Editing and archiving a published workflow

Editing and archiving are available at any time from the ⋮ menu on the workflow card in the Custom Workflows group of your My Workflows tab. The menu offers Edit Workflow, Set Schedule, Share, Clone and Archive.

Edit Workflow opens the Edit Custom Workflows window. There, Title and the descriptive fields (such as the Summary shown on the card) can be updated directly, along with the schedule and notification switches; select Save Changes when you're done. The workflow's AI Instructions are marked Read-only — they are built through the conversation. To change them, select the banner at the top of the window — "Edit this workflow with chat. Click to open a conversation." — describe the change, then save.

Editing a workflow you have already shared updates it everywhere it is shared — recipients get the new version without you re-sharing.

Archiving takes the workflow out of the Library everywhere and stops anyone newly adding it, but colleagues in other workspaces who had already added it do not simply lose it. They keep a faded Original archived card on their My Workflows tab, which they cannot run, and choose either Keep — saving a copy into their own workspace — or Retire, which clears the card. Archiving is therefore not a way to withdraw a workflow from people who already had it; untick their workspace in the Share dialog instead.

A copy someone keeps is frozen at the version they kept and stops receiving your changes, which is the same trade-off as any clone. Restoring the workflow brings it back for anyone who took no action, along with all its previous sharing.

See Editing a custom workflow in SoterAI.

Export a custom workflow

Custom workflows are also stored as records. To export one, go to Records, select the list icon on the Custom Workflows card, open the workflow from the list, and select Export in the top-right corner of its page.

Workflow visibility and permissions

How visibility works: a custom workflow is visible to its creator on save. It becomes visible to anyone else only through sharing, and then only in the Library's Shared with you sub-tab until each person adds it. If the owner later archives it, anyone who had added it keeps seeing it as a non-runnable archived card until they keep a copy or retire it. Permanent deletion is not supported — archive instead.