The IBM Workflow Assistant is a conversational panel in Workplace powered by watsonx.ai. Users type natural-language requests and the assistant works on their tasks and instances:
- find and filter work ("show my overdue tasks from process Order handling", multi-step commands in 25.0.1),
- explain and summarise a task or an instance (what happened so far, what is expected),
- generate content in context - an e-mail to the customer, a comment, a rejection reason, a description,
- help with team management actions.
What it sees: only what the user is entitled to see through Workplace (task list, task data, instance details, business data and comments); the assistant sends the relevant data to the configured watsonx.ai provider to generate the answer - so the choice between watsonx.ai on IBM Cloud and watsonx.ai on Cloud Pak for Data (on-premises, supported from 25.0.0) is a data-residency decision, not a functional one.
Enablement: configure the generative AI provider for the Workflow runtime (the same configuration as for the generative AI activities: provider URL, project, API key alias, egress policy), then enable the assistant feature for Workplace in the Workflow configuration; users see the assistant icon in Workplace. There is no per-process switch - it works on any task.
Designing for good answers - the assistant is only as good as the data your processes expose:
- meaningful task subjects and instance names (Approve order ORD-42 for ACME (12,500 EUR), not "Task 3"),
- business data marked available in search with readable aliases (customer, amount, status) - it is what the assistant can filter on,
- documentation on activities and a short narrative on the BPD (shown as descriptions),
- comments and instance history kept (do not clear them in scripts).
// instance name expression on the BPD - the assistant, Workplace search and users all benefit
"Order " + tw.local.order.number + " - " + tw.local.order.customerName + " (" + tw.local.order.total + " " + tw.local.order.currency + ")"
// activity documentation (shown as task description): "Check the pricing against the contract; reject if the deviation is above 5 %."Governance: the generated texts are suggestions the user edits and sends; the platform does not act on the model's output on its own. Log the feature's use (the Workflow logs record assistant calls) and inform users about what leaves the platform when a cloud provider is used.
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