Offers and flow ideas

Two ways a flow can start with a person’s judgement rather than run straight away:

Offers. A flow set to suggest first does not run when it matches. It waits on the record as a card someone accepts, asks approval for, or dismisses.
Ideas. Once a week Plugboard looks at the changes your desk makes by hand to fresh tickets and suggests flows that would do them.

Suggest first

Open a flow, then its settings, and find Suggest first. Tick Offer it on the ticket first (or the repair, or the person’s page, depending on what the flow is about).

Suggest first works only on flows that start by themselves on a ticket, a repair or a person, because that is where the card is shown. Flows run by hand, started by a request, or called by another flow already start because someone chose to run them, so there is nothing to suggest.

Setting	What it does
The question on the card	The card’s title. Leave it empty and Plugboard writes one from the first step, such as “Add Mia Chen to Y9 Shared Drive?”
Request approval asks	Who is asked when someone presses Request approval

Request approval asks offers:

Nobody: whoever presses Do it now decides (the flow’s owner is asked if someone requests approval anyway);
Their manager and Their manager’s manager (flows about a person only);
Anyone who holds a role;
People you choose (up to 10).

It is never the person who asked, and never the person the record is about.

A flow in Watching never offers anything; it only records what it would have done (see testing a flow). An open offer counts as an open run when the flow allows only one run per record.

The offer card

Offers sit in the Flows section of a ticket, a repair and a person’s page, above the flow runs. Each card shows:

the question;
which flow suggested it, and when;
when an AI condition matched, the question the AI was asked and how sure it was;
up to four lines of what it will do, worked out by a dry run against the record as it is when you look;
what it needs, such as “Needs a go-ahead with step-up”.

Seeing offers needs flow.view and access to the record within your campus and desk.

Running it yourself

Do it now starts the run as you, after you confirm it is you. Steps you can do yourself run under your press, as they would if you ran the flow by hand. Privileged steps need step-up. Steps you cannot do ask someone who can for a go-ahead (see the flows overview).

If the record concerns you (you raised the ticket, it is about you, or you own the repair), your press is not a go-ahead for anything: those steps ask someone else.

Do it now shows only while the flow is on. Pressing it withdraws any approval already asked for.

Request approval

Request approval asks the people the flow names (or its owner, if it names nobody). Each must be active, hold approvals.decide, and be able to open both the record and the ticket the approval sits on. Whoever raised the record and anyone it concerns are left out. At most 20 people are asked.

The approval sits on the ticket, or on the run’s case ticket for a repair or a person. It lapses after 7 days. Plugboard checks approvals once a minute:

Outcome	What happens
Approved	The run starts as the approver. They are checked again first: still active, still able to decide approvals and open the record, and not someone the record concerns
Declined	The run closes as declined. Nothing runs
Lapsed	The run closes as “Nobody approved it in time”. Nothing runs
Approved by someone no longer allowed	Nothing runs
The flow was turned off first	Nothing runs

A repair with no ticket has nowhere to ask: use Do it now or Dismiss.

Dismiss

Dismiss, the quiet button on the card’s heading row, closes the offer. The toast has an Undo button, and the person who dismissed it can bring it back for up to 10 minutes.

Offers themselves do not lapse. An offer stays on the record until someone answers it.

Every offer is in the AI ledger

Each offer is recorded once, when its card is first shown, in Admin, AI activity, under Suggestions (feature “Flow decisions”). The ledger then records the answer:

Answer	Recorded as
Do it now, or approved	Accepted
Dismiss, or declined	Dismissed
Lapsed, turned off, or approved by someone not allowed	Expired, which does not count as a person’s answer

An offer makes no model call and costs nothing. It is in the ledger so the desk can see which suggestions it takes. When the offer came from a condition written in words, the AI’s answer to that condition is labelled right or wrong from what the person did. AI activity needs audit.view.

This could be a flow

The This could be a flow panel sits at the top of the Flows tab on /flows, above the flow list, for people who hold flow.build. It shows only when there is at least one idea.

Each idea names a pattern your desk repeated by hand, such as “Your desk set the priority to High and the queue to Network on 12 Wi-Fi tickets this term”, with chips for what a flow would do.

Use this makes an unpublished draft (trigger: a ticket is raised; condition: its category; steps: set fields and assign) and opens it. Change it, test it and publish it like any other flow.
Dismiss removes the idea. The same pattern is never suggested again.

How ideas are found

Ideas come from structured records only. No AI is called, and no ticket text is read.

Only changes people made to priority, queue and assignee are read, from the audit log.
Only changes made in a ticket’s first two days count, over the last 70 days.
A pattern is one desk, one category and the same first values. It needs at least five tickets.
At most five ideas are open at a time. A pattern already offered, used or dismissed is never offered again, and one whose assignee has left is skipped.
The check runs hourly and makes one digest per week (weeks start Monday, UTC). Nothing runs while Flows is off.
You see an idea only if you can open at least one of the tickets behind it.

Using or dismissing an idea is recorded in the audit log, and both appear under Suggestions in AI activity (feature “Flow drafting”).

Flows overview, for go-aheads and approvals
People flows
Building a flow