Today we are shipping something that a significant number of Agenno users have been asking for since they signed up: templates. Sixty of them, organised by category, each one a complete plain-English automation description that you can open, read, and customise for your team in a few minutes.
I want to explain what these templates are, where they came from, and — importantly — what we decided not to do when building them. Because there is a version of "automation templates" that would have been easy to build and not very useful, and we deliberately tried to avoid it.
Where the 60 templates came from
We pulled the automation descriptions submitted by Agenno users during their first week on the platform and looked at which processes appeared repeatedly across different teams and different companies. The highest-frequency processes were almost entirely predictable: order notifications, invoice approvals, new customer onboarding tasks, weekly report distribution, stock level alerts, overdue payment reminders. These are the processes that enough teams run, in roughly similar enough ways, that a starting description has real value.
The 60 templates represent the top of that frequency distribution. We excluded anything that appeared fewer than a handful of times — not because those processes are less valid to automate, but because a template for a rare-use-case process tends to be either too generic to be useful or too specific to one company's system setup to apply elsewhere.
We also excluded processes that reliably required significant customisation in the clarifying questions phase. If virtually every team that described a process needed to answer six or seven clarifying questions before the automation could be built, a template starting point does not save much time. For those processes, the time is spent in specification, not in the initial description, and a template that skips the specification would create more confusion than it resolves.
What a template actually is in Agenno
A template in Agenno is a complete plain-English automation description, written in the same format you would use if you were typing it yourself, with placeholder text for the parts that differ between teams. Open a template and you will see something like: "When a new row is added to [your orders spreadsheet], check if the order value in [column name] exceeds [threshold amount]. If it does, send an email to [recipient name or email] with the subject 'High-value order alert' and include the order reference and customer name from the row."
The bracketed sections are the customisation points. They are labelled clearly and most of them have a short note explaining what to put there. You edit them directly in the description, the same way you would write or edit any Agenno description, and then the clarifying questions phase handles anything that still needs to be specified.
We made a deliberate choice to keep templates as plain-English descriptions rather than abstracting them into a visual template editor with dropdowns and form fields. The reason is that visual template editors tend to constrain the customisation to the dimensions the template designer anticipated. If your version of the high-value order alert needs to notify a Slack channel instead of sending an email, a form-based template might not have a field for that — and you would have to exit the template entirely to express it. A plain-English description that you can edit freely does not have that problem.
The categories
The 60 templates are organised into six categories. Finance and billing covers invoice processing, payment reminders, expense approvals, and monthly reporting. Operations covers order management, stock alerts, returns processing, and supplier communications. Customer success covers onboarding sequences, renewal reminders, and customer health scoring updates. HR and people covers new hire task creation, contractor onboarding, and leave approval routing. Reporting covers scheduled report compilation and distribution across a range of common formats. Admin covers meeting follow-up tasks, shared inbox routing, and document filing workflows.
Within each category, templates range from straightforward single-step automations to multi-step processes with conditional branches. We have tried to label the complexity accurately — each template shows an approximate setup time, which ranges from a few minutes for the simplest ones to around half an hour for the more conditional ones.
How to get value from them quickly
The fastest path to a running automation from a template is to open one that closely matches a process you currently run manually, read through the full description before editing anything, and then make the customisation edits in a single pass. Reading first matters because the description often contains logic details — the order of operations, the data lookup sequence — that you will want to verify against your own process before committing to it.
If your process differs in a way that requires more than editing the placeholder fields — a different number of recipients, an additional conditional branch, a different output format — edit the description directly rather than trying to force it into the template's structure. Templates are starting points, not contracts. Diverging from a template is fine and expected.
We are not saying templates are the right approach for every team. If your processes are highly specific to your company's systems or your company's way of working, starting from scratch with a fresh description is often faster than finding and adapting a template. Templates are most valuable when the process is genuinely common — when the category and the basic structure match well enough that the customisation is mainly about data locations and recipient lists rather than process logic.
What comes next
We will add to the library over time based on usage patterns. The 60 templates at launch represent our best read of what is most commonly needed right now. As more teams use Agenno, we will see new high-frequency processes emerge — probably reflecting the specific integrations we have added most recently — and we will build templates around those.
We are also working on a way for teams to save their own automations as private templates within their account. If your team has built a well-refined automation that several departments could use with minor variation, being able to save it and share it internally without exporting and re-importing a description is a real efficiency gain. That feature is in progress and we expect to ship it in the coming months.
In the meantime, the 60 templates are live and browseable at agenno.org/templates. The categories are filterable, each template has a short description, and you can preview the full plain-English description before deciding to use it. The feedback we are most interested in is about gaps — processes that appear frequently enough in your team's work that a starting template would genuinely help, but which are not in the current library.