In today’s fast-paced business environment, knowledge workers often spend significant time searching for tasks, piecing together context, and creating content to complete their work. This inefficiency slows productivity and impacts overall business agility. To address this challenge, we’re excited to introduce the new Workplace Assistant—a groundbreaking, AI agent-powered conversational assistant designed to transform how you interact with IBM Business Automation Workflow 25.0.1.0 and workflow in IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automaton 25.0.1. It understands context, executes complex commands, and adapts to dynamic requirements.

The new Workplace Assistant: built for enterprise reality

The new Workplace Assistant redefines productivity with a natural language-driven interface that lets users interact intuitively—no more rigid commands, just effortless conversations. It introduces powerful capabilities like multi-steps command execution and process and case summaries, enabling complex actions in a single prompt. Built on a smarter agent-based architecture, the assistant delivers intelligent, context-aware responses and transparent decision-making, ensuring every interaction feels seamless and informed.

Use Cases

Natural language-driven interface

The new Workplace Assistant leverages advanced natural language understanding to interpret the user’s commands naturally. It moves beyond rigid, predefined commands, end users can interact naturally, using flexible language to perform any available action— making the assistant feel intuitive and effortless.

You can simply type: “Which tasks are overdue?” or “Do I have any task overdue?”, the assistant will list all overdue tasks and filter the current task list to show only the overdue tasks. With the new Workplace Assistant, you can even ask “Show me what I need to finish today”, which will list all the tasks due today. This flexibility means you spend less time figuring out the right command and more time getting work done.

Here is another example to filter case instances based on the case instance status.
You can simply type: “Which case instances are completed?” The assistant will list all completed case instances and filter the case instances in workplace showing only the completed case instances.

Multi-step commands support

With multi-step command execution, complex actions can be completed in one prompt, such as reassigning all tasks from one user to another in a single step. Take this for example: user types “Reassign all Grace’s tasks to Tyler.” The assistant understands this involves:

            - Finding tasks owned by Grace

            - Reassigning them to Tyler

The previous version required two separate commands: “show tasks own by Grace”, then select all those tasks and “reassign all the selected tasks to Tyler”. The new version executes the entire workflow in one conversational turn.

Gain insights into workflows, tasks, or cases

Workplace Assistant now goes beyond simple task summaries, delivering detailed summaries for processes and cases to keep users fully informed.

Summarize a process instance

You can select a workflow instance from the list to get its summary.

You can also provide a custom prompt to format the summary, for example, “Summarize this workflow in bullet points.” Or ask some specific information, like “Give me a workflow summary and tell me how many tasks of this workflow are active?”

Summarize a case instance

You can select a case instance from the list to get its summary

You can get the summary for a case instance in a short paragraph. This allows you to generate text quickly without having to write it manually. By using simple prompts, you can create concise and clear summaries.

For example, when we select a case instance from the list, we can ask it to summarize it in a paragraph, with the prompt “Get Case instance summary and summarize it in a paragraph”.

Further you can ask some specific information, like “Tell me how many activities exists in selected case instance”

FISMA audit logging and integration with IBM Instana Observability 

Additionally, the new Workplace Assistant is FISMA audit logging ready and is enabled for IBM Instana integration, which provides real-time application performance monitoring and observability.

Conclusion

The new Workplace Assistant marks a significant leap forward in enterprise automation. By combining advanced AI agent architecture with secure, lightweight deployment, it empowers organizations to move beyond rigid, predefined commands and embrace truly conversational, context-aware interactions. Whether you need to manage tasks, summarize workflows, cases or execute multi-step actions seamlessly, this assistant delivers speed, reliability, and compliance. It is not just an upgrade; it is a transformation in how businesses orchestrate work.