Furnace makes a loud bang when it starts up. Still heating though. Can someone look this week?
Expect: Support, normal priority. Goes to approval.
Playbook 3
The Night Shift
The inbox gets read all night. A real emergency pages the on-call technician within a minute and gets no AI reply at all. Everything else gets a draft that waits for a person to tap Approve.
The clip from the talkComing soon. The steps below work without it.
What you are building
Each new email starts one run. The AI reads it, checks the handbook's emergency rules, and decides. Emergencies go up: page the on-call person, mark the email handled. Everything else goes down: a draft that waits for approval. Approve, and the reply goes out in the same email thread. Needs edits, and the team is told a person is handling it.
Main pathWhat an AI step usesStarts the run
Click any stepto see what it does in plain English.
File: . Change your setup and the diagram and file change with it.
Build it
0 steps done
Load the handbook
Open your Playbook 2 workflow and run Load the handbook. This playbook uses the emergency rules in Section 11.
Import and connect
- New email arrives, Mark as handled, Send the reply: your credential, signed in as the test mailbox.
- AI model and Embeddings: as in Playbook 2.
- Page the on-call tech: Teams, the
on-callchannel. Flag for edits: theinbound-draftschannel. Ask for approval: your 1:1 chat with the approver (you, for now). - Page the on-call tech: Slack,
#on-call. Flag for edits:#inbound-drafts. Ask for approval: pick yourself as the user. - Page the on-call tech, Flag for edits, and Ask for approval all email . For a real on-call page, point the page step at a phone-friendly address.
Turn it on
Publish (activate) the workflow. From now on it checks the test inbox every minute and starts one run per new unread email. Leave this tab open so you can watch Executions.
Send the overnight mail
From your normal email address, send these four to the test mailbox, one email each. Use the subject and body shown.
N01Email subject: Furnace noise N02Email subject: Heat pump financing Do you offer financing on heat pumps? Thinking about switching from oil.
Expect: Sales. Mentions 0% for 12 months, without promising approval.
N03Email subject: Invoice 4492 Can I pay invoice 4492 by ACH?
Expect: Billing. Yes.
N05Email subject: Comfort Club Interested in Comfort Club for 2 systems. How much?
Expect: Sales. $219 per system, $438 total.
Within a minute or two, four approval requests arrive in your Teams chatas Slack messagesin your team inbox, each with Approve and send and Needs edits buttons. Each one waits on its own, so one slow decision never holds up the others.
Send the one that never waits
N04Email subject: NO HEAT No heat. It's 52 inside and we have a newborn. Please call ASAP.
Expect: Emergency. Pages on-call within about a minute. No draft, no approval request.
Within about a minute: a PAGE lands in the on-call channelin #on-callin your team inbox, with the reason, the customer, and the message. No draft is written and no approval is requested. A person calls the customer. That keeps the rule intact: nothing reaches a customer without a human.
Be the supervisor
Read each draft. Approve the financing one (N02) and check your normal inbox: the reply arrives in the same thread. Press Needs edits on another and watch the note appear for the team. Check that N05's draft quotes $219 per system.
Read the log
Open the N04 run in Executions. Click Read and draft: you can see the handbook passages it checked and its
urgent_reason. Then open one routine run and notice it is still waiting, parked at the approval step until someone decides.
Try this next
Add an urgency rule of your own. Open Read and draft and add a line, for example: Water leaking from an indoor unit onto finished flooring is urgent. Email yourself a message about it and check that it pages instead of drafting.
Batch the routine mail at 6:00 a.m. The talk version reads routine mail once each morning. Add a Schedule Trigger set to 6:00, followed by a Microsoft Outlook "Get many messages"Gmail "Get many messages" step for unread mail from the last 12 hours, and connect it into Shape message. Keep the every-minute trigger for emergencies.
Bring it home
Which inbox in your business gets mail at night or on weekends: info@, service@, orders@? Write down what counts as an emergency there, in plain sentences, and who should be paged. That list becomes the urgent rules in the prompt. Keep the approval step for at least the first month, and count how many drafts you approve unchanged. That number tells you whether it is earning trust.
If something goes wrong
Nothing happens when I send an email
Check that the workflow is published (active), that the email went to the test mailbox, and that it is unread. The trigger checks once a minute. Mail sent from the same address you connected may be skipped by some providers, so send from a different address.
N04 drafted a reply instead of paging
Add one line to the prompt in Read and draft: A newborn in a home with no heat is always urgent. Then test it five times. Do not rely on it until it passes every time.
The approval buttons do not work
Approval buttons call back to your n8n, so the workflow must be published, and your n8n must be reachable from the internet (n8n Cloud always is). If chat approvals misbehave, switch "Where your team talks" to Email only, download again, and use email approvals instead.
The same email was handled twice
Routine mail stays unread until it is approved or edited, which is fine: the trigger only fires once for each new message. If you re-mark mail as unread while testing, it can start a second run.