Automations: the complete guide

Every team has repetitive processes that eat into focus time. Collecting status updates, routing feedback, reminding people about deadlines, pulling data from external tools. These tasks are necessary, but doing them manually means someone on your team is spending their brainpower on logistics instead of actual work.

Dailybot automations handle this by turning repetitive processes into configured workflows that run on their own. You define what should happen, when, and for whom, and Dailybot executes it reliably in the background.

The building blocks

Automations in Dailybot are built from a few core primitives. Check-ins collect structured responses from team members on a schedule. Forms gather data through conversational interfaces in chat. Commands execute actions on demand, from simple text responses to API calls that fetch live data from external systems. Workflows chain these primitives together with conditional logic and variables.

Each primitive can run independently or as part of a larger flow. A simple automation might send a weekly mood check to your team every Friday. A complex one might trigger a form when a deploy happens, route the responses to different channels based on the answers, and update an external dashboard through an API call.

Setting up your first automation

The fastest path to value is creating a check-in. Pick a question your team answers regularly (what did you work on today, what are you blocked on, what is your plan for tomorrow), set a schedule, and choose who receives it. Dailybot sends the questions to each person in their preferred chat platform and collects the responses in a central feed.

From there, you can layer on complexity. Add conditional follow-up questions that only appear based on previous answers. Include variables that pull in data from your project tools. Set up digest notifications that summarize all responses and send them to a specific channel.

Workflows and conditional logic

For teams that need more sophisticated automation, Dailybot’s workflow engine lets you chain actions together with conditions. A workflow might start with a form submission, check whether the submitter selected “urgent,” and if so, immediately notify the on-call engineer while also creating a ticket in your project tracker through an API integration.

Variables are the glue that holds workflows together. They let you reference data from earlier steps, user properties, or external sources, and use that data in messages, API payloads, or routing decisions. The variables system supports text, numbers, dates, and lists.

API integrations

For developer-oriented teams, the API request feature in commands opens up powerful integrations. You can create commands that query your monitoring system, pull deployment status from CI/CD pipelines, or fetch customer metrics from your analytics platform. The response gets formatted and delivered right in chat, so your team gets live data without switching tools.

API requests support GET, POST, PUT, and DELETE methods with configurable headers, authentication, and response parsing. You can use Dailybot variables in any part of the request, making it possible to build dynamic integrations that adapt based on who runs the command or what data was collected earlier in a workflow.

Scaling automations across teams

As your organization grows, you will likely want to standardize certain workflows across teams. Dailybot supports templates that let you define an automation once and deploy it to multiple teams with different configurations. This keeps the process consistent while allowing each team to customize details like schedule, questions, and notification channels.

The best practice is to start with a few high-impact automations (daily standups, weekly retrospectives, incident intake) and expand from there based on what your teams actually need. Resist the temptation to automate everything at once. Each automation should solve a specific, measurable pain point.