Set the rule once. It runs itself from then on.

Both are your AI; what differs is who decides the moment to act. With an automation, an event you wire decides it: when this happens, the agent reaches out every time, working from the customer’s full context. With a proactive agent, the AI decides the moment itself, scanning for who needs attention before any event names them. An automation is your AI on a trigger you set; a proactive agent is your AI using its own judgment. Most businesses run both on the same agent.

Things that actually happen in your business: a conversation resolved, a quote sent, a payment received, a new contact created, a frustration signal raised. They can also come from the software you already run, so a job completed or a technician dispatched in your field service tool arrives as a webhook and sets the rule off. The trigger is real work, not a button someone presses.

Yes. Each rule carries its own conditions, so a follow-up can be limited to quotes over a value or contacts in an area, and its own delay, so a review request waits an hour after the job instead of landing immediately. A consent check also runs before any message leaves, so the rule only contacts people who agreed to hear from you.

Yes. A rule can chain several actions off one trigger, in order, so a finished job can send the review request, notify the team, and tag the contact in a single pass. You set the steps once and the agent runs them every time the event fires.

An approval step. A rule that only sends a message runs on its own with a consent check, but a rule that touches money or account state, a refund or a cancellation, can require a person to approve before it executes. The automation is your AI on a trigger, with your guardrails on the actions that matter, not a loose cannon.

No. Cloning an industry template brings the rules that trade usually needs already set up, like a job follow-up for home services or a post-visit review for a salon. You keep, edit, or switch off each one, so the common outreach is running the day you start rather than being a setup task you keep postponing.