What Are AI Workflows?

What Are AI Workflows?

The Helpium chatbot is great at answering questions from your knowledge base. But real support conversations rarely stop at one question. Customers want to check an order, qualify for a refund, book a demo, or reset a password, and each of those needs a few back-and-forth steps.

That is what AI Workflows are for. A workflow is a visual flowchart you build in AI Workflows (in the main sidebar). Each workflow is made of nodes connected by edges, and Helpium walks through them automatically when a customer matches your trigger.

How workflows fit alongside the rest of Helpium

Helpium gives you three different tools to handle a customer message, and they are designed to work together:

• Knowledge base articles answer "what is" and "how do I" questions. The chatbot reads them and replies in plain language.
• AI Actions let the chatbot call your APIs to fetch live data, like an order status or an account balance.
• AI Workflows orchestrate multi-step conversations: ask, branch, call an action, wait, hand off, end.

A simple "What are your business hours?" question is best handled by an article. A one-shot lookup like "Where is my order?" is a great fit for an AI Action. Anything that needs a sequence (collect details, classify intent, route to the right team, follow up later) is a workflow.

What a workflow can do

Out of the box, every workflow can:

• Trigger from an incoming customer message, or proactively from the widget.
• Ask the customer for input and capture the answer into a named variable.
• Use AI to classify the conversation and route it down different branches.
• Run if/else conditions on captured values.
• Call your own APIs through AI Actions and use the response in later steps.
• Pause for a fixed duration before continuing.
• Hand the conversation off to a human agent.
• End cleanly with a final message.

Common use cases

The patterns we see most often:

• Lead qualification. Ask the visitor a few questions, classify the company size or use case, and route hot leads to sales.
• Order lookup and refund triage. Collect the order number, call your API, and decide whether the customer self-serves or needs an agent.
• Onboarding nudges. Trigger proactively on a specific page, ask if they need help, and surface the right article or hand off.
• Post-purchase follow-up. Wait a few days after a purchase, then check in and collect feedback.

Where to learn more

If you are new to workflows, work through these in order:

1. Workflow Nodes Explained covers every node type.
2. Building Your First Workflow walks through a full example end to end.
3. Proactive Workflows, Variables, and Human Handoff covers the more advanced patterns once you are comfortable.