Esca Automations

Esca Automations is a workflow automation engine for 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 content changes, run on a schedule or on demand, call external services, and drive AI agents.

Esca runs as a sidecar: a standalone application that connects to your Brightspot CMS rather than being installed inside it. Automations live and execute in Esca and act on the connected CMS and the other systems you integrate, so the automation workload scales and is governed independently of the CMS it serves.

Esca orchestrates business processes; it is not an AI agent framework. It owns what runs and when, and delegates agent reasoning to external runtimes through a dedicated AI action.

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 Esca 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 tours the workspace and walks you through your first automation end to end. After that, the guide is built to dip into: read the building-block sections when you need them, and keep the Reference close for looking up a specific node or 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.

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.
• 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, and Slack through saved, authenticated connections; 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.
• Multi-tenant by design—automations, connections, and variables are scoped per site.

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 a tour of the workspace and your first automation, and keep the reference at hand for every node and connection type, field by field.

Documentation for deploying, operating, and extending Esca is maintained separately for Brightspot teams.