Automation Assistant: The Object Designer Co-Pilot

As a developer or object designer, your daily work revolves around designing and scripting objects to meet specific business requirements. Automic Automation's Gen AI capabilities can significantly enhance your productivity and streamline your tasks.

Let’s walk through a typical day and see how the Automation Assistant can help:

Drafting Object Configurations

You begin by drafting and configuring objects like Jobs, File Transfers, Events, Workflows and so forth. You often deal with complex dependencies, scheduling requirements, and multi-step processes. Here, the Automation Assistant acts as your context-aware and conversational co-pilot. It guides you with natural language to simplify the creation and configuration of these objects, such as scheduling processes with business calendar considerations or orchestrating multi-step Workflows. The Automation Assistant transforms how you create and maintain objects.

Example Prompts

Create a Workflow that runs a database backup Job on the first business day of each month, considering the US holiday calendar
Create a database maintenance Workflow that runs very night at 2 AM and notify the user if any of the required tasks fail

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Scripting

As you move into scripting, instead of manually coding every line, you describe what you want the script to do in natural language. Specify the script language you want to use (Python, Bash, or PowerShell) and the Gen AI-powered code assist functionality generates relevant code snippets within the script editor. You can iterate conversationally with the assistant, refining and improving your scripts until they match your needs, making script development faster and less error-prone, even if scripting is not your primary expertise.

Example Prompt

I want to loop through a specific action and pass a unique value from a parent script to a child script in each iteration. With this, I want to trigger downstream processes with dynamic data without manually creating multiple objects. The Parent Script must run a loop 5 times. In each loop, a variable named &parent_param_value# must be created containing the text "This is value #[iteration number] from the parent Script". The Parent Script must trigger the Child Script inside that loop. The Child Script must be able to "see" and use the specific variable passed from that specific loop iteration. The Child Script must print the received variable value to its own activation report for auditing purposes.

To make your scripts even smarter, you can embed the ASK_AI function directly within them, allowing natural language prompts to call the Automation.AI component at runtime for dynamic tasks like content generation, classification, or error analysis tailored to the execution context.

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Debugging

Once scripts and objects are ready, testing and debugging can be time-consuming. The Automic Automation helps you understand script logic by explaining entire scripts or fragments in plain language, highlighting variables, control flows, and dependencies. It also analyzes your scripts for errors or risky patterns, suggesting safer alternatives to prevent runtime issues, ensuring robustness in your automation.

Example Prompt

Explain this PowerShell script that migrates files from one server to another

Analyzing, Troubleshooting and Optimizing

After execution, you use the Automic Automation to analyze execution data and reports. It summarizes key outcomes, explains what happened during the run, identifies why failures or delays occurred, and points out which parts of your objects or scripts contributed to those issues. This insight accelerates troubleshooting, helps you optimize error handling and dependencies, and improves overall reliability.

This capability is accessible from various points in AWI where an execution's RunID is present, allowing for contextual analysis of task outcome.

Example Prompt

After a job fails, you can ask the Automation Assistant to Analyze the execution report for RunID 12345 to identify the cause of the failure

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Finalizing

Finally, when errors or suboptimal configurations are detected, the Automation Assistant guides you step-by-step through identifying and correcting these issues within AWI. It offers suggestions on property changes, dependency adjustments, or script optimizations, reducing guesswork and speeding up resolution. You might see a suggestion like: Change the timeout value for this job to prevent it from being killed prematurely.

Throughout your daily work, from design to deployment, testing, and optimization, the Automic Automation integrates AI-powered guidance seamlessly.

For more information, see MCP TOPIC