Your First Automation (5-Minute Guide)

Start with a conversation

The easiest way to build your first automation is through the chat interface. Open a new chat session and describe the workflow you want in plain language. For example: 'Every morning at 9am, fetch all Stripe charges from yesterday and send a summary to our revenue Slack channel.' The AI agent will build the automation for you.

The two-phase build process

When you describe a workflow, the AI follows a reliable two-phase process:

  1. Test phase — the AI uses execute_steps to run the workflow step by step, examining real API responses and verifying data flows correctly between steps
  2. Save phase — once the tested steps produce correct results, the AI saves them with create_automation using the exact same steps that were verified

By the time your automation is saved, it has already been proven to work against your real data.

Scheduling your automation

After the AI saves the automation, it will ask if you want to add a schedule. Chase Agents supports four schedule types:

  • Cron — precise schedule using standard cron syntax, for example "0 9 * * 1-5" for weekdays at 9am
  • Interval — run every N minutes, for example every 30 minutes
  • Once — run one time at a specific datetime
  • Webhook — run whenever an external service sends an HTTP POST request to a unique URL

Running and monitoring

Every automation can also be run manually at any time from the My Automations page. Each run — whether scheduled, triggered, or manual — is logged in Workflow History. You can drill into any run to see the output of each step, confirm the data that flowed through, and debug any failures.

Triggering via API

You can trigger automations programmatically from your own applications using the Chase Agents API. Send a POST request to the automation trigger endpoint with your X-ChaseAgents-API-Key header. Input data passed in the request body is available as dataPrev in the first step of the automation.