AI workflows & automation
AI workflows & automation
Furnace has a durable workflow runtime for multi-step AI and automation work: branches, parallel steps, waits for external events, retries, and runs that resume correctly after an interruption rather than restarting from zero.
Authored, then published, then run
A workflow starts as an editable document — nodes, connections, labels, model choices — authored visually in Workflow Studio. That document is not what runs. Publishing compiles it into an immutable definition, and only a published revision can be executed. Editing a draft never changes a run already in flight: every run is pinned to the exact revision it started with, so a workflow can be safely iterated on while older runs keep executing against the version they began on.
Runs are durable
Once started, a run's progress is journaled step by step, which is what makes the rest possible:
- Branches and parallel steps — a workflow can fan work out to several steps at once and join on completion.
- Waits — a run can pause indefinitely for an external event without holding any resource open.
- Retries — steps that can safely retry are retried automatically; steps that can't (a paid model call, for instance) are not retried silently, because replaying an uncertain result is a decision, not a default.
- Resume after interruption — a run that's interrupted picks back up from its last completed step rather than starting over.
Governed models, not raw credentials
A workflow step that calls a model picks a governed model deployment — an identifier with its own budget and policy — never a raw provider API key or an arbitrary provider/model override. That keeps every model call inside a budget and a policy the platform owns, and means a workflow document itself never contains anything that could be extracted and reused as a credential.
Operating a workflow
Operators control and observe runs — start, cancel, restart from a safe checkpoint, inspect step-by-step progress — over the platform's own interfaces rather than a bespoke dashboard. See Workflows & durable runs for how that control surface is exposed.