Automating Insights with AI Studio (Beta)

You can automate how your team responds to anomalies by creating an automation in AI Studio (Beta) that runs when an Insight is triggered. This helps reduce manual triage, keeps response steps consistent, and notifies the right people quickly.

What this automation can do

• Trigger automatically when a selected Insights Rule detects an anomaly

• Read Insight details and use them as context for AI instructions

• Invoke a Specialist, tool, or skill by using @ in the instructions

• Update the Insight by acknowledging, resolving, or reopening it, changing its severity, or adding a comment

• Pause for human approval before continuing

• Send notifications through Email, Microsoft Teams, or Slack

Common use cases

Use Insight-triggered automations to:

• Escalate high-impact anomalies by increasing their severity and notifying an operational team.

• Acknowledge known or expected low-severity patterns and add an explanatory comment.

• Use the Insight dimension or dimension value to notify the appropriate business or technical team.

• Add a consistent, timestamped comment that records how the Insight was reviewed and what action the workflow took.

Before you begin

• Make sure the Insight Rule you want to use already exists.

• Confirm you have access to AI Studio > Automations.

• Prepare the instruction text you want the automation to follow.

• Decide whether the workflow should update the Insight directly or wait for approval first.

Step-by-step procedure

1. Go to AI Studio > Automations.

2. Click + New Automation and select Skip to manual setup.

   

3. Select On app event as the trigger.

   

4. Set the event to An Insight fires.

   

5. Select the Insights Rules that should trigger this automation.

   

6. Click + Add Steps to build the workflow.

7. Select Read insights as a step.

   

9. Enter the Insight ID and choose to store it as a variable so it can be used in later steps.

10. Add your Instructions. You can mention a specialist, tool, or skill by typing @ followed by its name.

    

9. Add Wait for approval when a reviewer must approve the proposed Insight update. Under Assign to, select the roles or people who should receive the inbox notification.

   

10. Add Update insights to acknowledge, resolve, or reopen the Insight, change its severity, or add a comment.

    

11. If needed, add a notification step to send the result through Email, Teams, or Slack to a channel, group, or individual recipient.

12. Click Save.

13. Use Test run if you want to validate the workflow before relying on it in production.

15. After testing the workflow successfully, select Activate. The automation does not respond to new Insight events while it is inactive.

    

Configure the Insight workflow steps

Use Read insights to load the Insight context into the automation. Add Wait for approval when a reviewer must approve a proposed change. Use Update insights to apply the approved action.

Read insights

The Read insights step retrieves the Insight generated by the trigger and makes its details available to later steps.

Configure the following fields:

Later steps can reference fields from the stored Insight. For example:

• {{insight.summary}}

• {{insight.severity}}

Use these fields in instructions, conditions, approval requests, comments, and notifications.

Wait for approval

Add Wait for approval when a person should review the analysis or proposed update before the automation changes the Insight.

Configure the following fields:

Under Assign to, you can select:

• One or more roles, such as Budget Owner, Cost Centre Owner, FinOps Admin, or Cloud Administrator

• One or more people, selected by name or email address

The selected reviewers receive an inbox notification. The automation pauses until someone responds.

The selected choice is available to later steps as {{human_decision}}. Any note entered by the reviewer is available as {{human_response}}.

Use these variables to control branches or add the reviewer’s decision to the Insight history.

Update insights

Use Update insights to change the Insight after the required analysis or approval is complete.

Configure the following fields:

The available actions are:

You can change the severity while performing a status action. Both status and comment updates create entries in the Insight history.

Example workflow

A common setup follows this flow:

On app event → Read insights → Instruction → Wait for approval → Update insights → Notify

Example scenario: A cloud cost anomaly triggers the automation. The automation reads the Insight and asks a Specialist to analyze the likely cause. It then sends the proposed severity or status change to a FinOps Admin or Cloud Administrator for approval. If approved, Update insights applies the change and records the analysis or reviewer note as a comment. The final outcome is sent to the selected notification channel.

Writing effective instructions

• Be specific about the outcome you want.

• Tell the automation whether it should only analyze the Insight or also update it.

• Use @ mentions to bring in the right specialist, skill, or tool.

• Ask for a concise summary if the result will be posted to a notification channel.

• Include approval logic when the action could affect operations or customer communication.

What users will see in Insights

When an automation updates an Insight, the action appears in the Insight Timeline with the label Performed by automation. This makes automated changes visible to users reviewing the incident history.

The automation output can also be viewed in JSON format within the Automation screen, which is useful for validation and troubleshooting.

Best practices

• Start with a test workflow for one Insight Rule before expanding to multiple rules.

• Use approval steps for actions that change ownership, severity, or customer-facing communication.

• Keep instructions focused and easy to evaluate.

• Send notifications only to the people or channels that need them.

• Review the JSON output during testing to confirm the workflow is using the expected context.

Related pages

• Insights Rules

• Insights