Esca Automations

Esca Automations is a workflow automation engine, with deep integrations with Brightspot CMS. You build automations in a visual flow editor—wiring triggers, conditions, actions, and loops into a graph—and the engine runs them with durable wait states, branching, looping, execution history, and human-in-the-loop approvals. Automations can react to events in the systems you connect, run on a schedule or on demand, call external services, and drive AI agents.

The engine runs as a standalone application rather than inside any of the systems it drives. Automations live and execute there and act outward on whatever you connect it to—a Brightspot CMS, an issue tracker, a chat workspace, any HTTP or OpenAPI service—so the automation workload scales and is governed on its own terms. Where a Brightspot CMS is one of those systems, the integration goes deeper than most: content events start automations, and steps read and write content against your live content model.

The platform orchestrates business processes: it owns what runs and when. AI is a step inside that flow rather than the thing driving it—an AI step runs an agent on a model you choose, and the automation around it decides what happens with the result. The AI Agent action runs the agent's whole reasoning loop on the platform itself, so it can draw on tools from more than one connected system in a single step. Where the work belongs somewhere else, two other steps hand it off: the Remote AI Agent action asks a connected Brightspot CMS to do the work with its own agent and tools, and the AWS AgentCore action invokes an agent hosted in your AWS account.

Meet Esca

Esca, Brightspot's AI agent, is an anglerfish who calls the depths of your content her territory. Let her take the tedious, repetitive work off your plate so you can spend less time fighting currents and more time in creative flow. See how Esca Automations can help your team.

Who this guide is for

This guide is for the people who build and run automations—editors, producers, and anyone on the business side who wants to take repetitive work off their plate. It assumes you know your way around the Brightspot CMS but expects no coding: everything here is done through the visual editor and standard forms. Developers extending the platform with new node and connection types are served by separate developer documentation.

How to use this guide

If you're new, start with Getting started—it explains the core ideas and walks you through your first automation end to end. After that, the guide is built to dip into: read the concepts when you need to understand a building block, and keep the built-in nodes and integrations catalogs close for looking up a specific step, field by field. If you can describe a process, you can usually automate it—and Esca can even draft the first version for you from a sentence.

What's in this guide

1. Getting started—the core ideas and your first automation end to end.
2. Building automations—the flow editor: the canvas, the panels, templates, validation, run modes, and importing and exporting.
3. Concepts—the building blocks an automation is made of:
   • Triggers—every way an automation can start.
   • Actions—the steps that do work.
   • Conditions and branching—routing a flow down different paths.
   • Loops and iteration—repeating a section of the flow once per item in a list.
   • Variables and secrets—passing data between steps and reusing encrypted credentials.
   • Connections—saved, authenticated links to external systems, including your own AI provider accounts.
   • AI agents and models—the agents catalog and how a step's model is chosen.
   • Human in the loop—pausing a run for a person to review, edit, or approve.
4. The workspace—a map of every page in the automation area.
5. Built-in nodes—every trigger, action, condition, and connection type, field by field.
6. Integrations—what each connected system can trigger on and do.
7. Monitoring and history—the dashboard, run history, live runs, logs, and output.
8. Content scripting—building and editing CMS content from a script.
9. Changelog—what changed in each version.

Key capabilities

• Visual flow editor—build automations on a canvas of connected nodes, each configured through standard CMS forms.
• Triggers—start an automation from a content event, a schedule, a manual run, an inbound webhook, or another automation completing.
• Actions—make HTTP requests, run scripts, send email, post to Slack, operate on CMS content, call any OpenAPI service, and invoke AI agents.
• Content scripting—build and edit CMS content from a script, with your content model's types and fields checked as you write.
• Conditions and branching—route a flow with expression, script, AI-judgment, and random-split nodes.
• Loops—iterate over a list in series or in parallel, with control over how item failures are handled.
• Variables and secrets—pass data between steps and reuse encrypted credentials across automations.
• Integrations—connect to your Brightspot CMS along with Jira, GitHub, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and AWS through saved, authenticated connections, and hold your own AI provider accounts the same way, so AI work runs on your credentials and your bill; email and OpenAPI services need no connection of their own.
• AI and human-in-the-loop—call an AI agent inside a flow and pause for a person to review, edit, or approve before it continues.
• History and monitoring—review every run step by step, with logs and outputs, alongside a health dashboard.

How it works

A trigger starts an automation and captures a snapshot of its definition and input. The engine then advances the flow's nodes through a state machine, resolving each node's inputs from earlier steps, variables, and secrets before the node runs. A node can finish immediately, branch to a different path, loop over a list, or wait—for a timer, an external event, or a human decision—and resume later. Every run is recorded as it progresses, so you can watch it live or audit it afterward.

Use cases

Editorial automation

When an editor publishes an article in the connected CMS, generate a summary and social variations with an AI action, then share them with the owning team in Slack. A content trigger starts the flow, AI actions produce the drafts, and a Slack action posts the result.

Content approval

When content is submitted for review, notify the reviewer and pause the flow until someone approves or rejects it. On approval, publish the asset; on rejection, route it back with the reviewer's notes. The flow holds on a human-in-the-loop step, so it consumes nothing while it waits.

Cross-system synchronization

When a GitHub release is published, post the release notes to a Slack channel and create a matching content asset in the CMS. A GitHub trigger starts the flow, and a content action and a Slack action carry it out.

Scheduled maintenance

On a recurring schedule, fetch a list of items from an external service and process each one—for example, creating or updating a content asset per item. A cron trigger starts the flow, an HTTP request retrieves the list, and a loop runs a content action for each entry.

Where to go from here

The user guide covers everything about building and running automations—start with Getting started for your first automation, keep the workspace at hand as a map of the pages, and turn to built-in nodes and integrations for every step and connection type, field by field.