Every company already has these
Somebody requests a day off. A discount needs a manager's sign-off. A new supplier has to be checked before the first invoice. A customer complaint has to reach the person who can answer it, and somebody has to notice if it does not.
None of this is exotic, and none of it is optional. What varies is only whether it is written down anywhere.
Where it usually lives
In email, in chat, and in the heads of the three people who know how it really works.
The request arrives in someone's inbox. They forward it to whoever they think approves that kind of thing. That person is away, so it sits. Two weeks later somebody asks what happened to it and there is no answer, because nothing recorded that it was ever raised - only that it was mentioned.
The alternative most companies try is a classical BPM system, and it fails in the opposite direction: a separate product, drawn by an analyst in a notation nobody else reads, integrated with the systems where the data actually lives through a project that takes a quarter. It becomes the thing you avoid changing, so it stops matching how the work is really done - and people go back to email.
What is different here
You describe it, and it gets built. What a request contains, who fills it in, who approves it, what may follow what - said in words. The assistant produces the working process, including the rejection path, the timeout and the status nobody remembers to add until March. The specialist who used to be required for this is the single biggest reason companies still run approvals out of a mailbox.
It runs where the data is. A route resolves who approves from the real org structure, a form's fields hold real references and not typed text, the tasks are readable by analytics without an export, and a row in a spreadsheet can start one.
Substitution is not a special case. Somebody being away is a normal condition of an organisation, not an exception the process discovers at the worst moment.
People answer from where they already are. A reply in Telegram or by email lands on the task as a comment - the participants who never open the system still take part in it.
And most of it should not involve a person at all. Everything that is a hand-off rather than a decision - the reminder, the copy, the notification, the nightly check, the update to the other system - runs by itself.
Where to go next
- What you can do - the process from the inside: requests and their fields, routes and approvals, who owns a task and what happens when they are away.
- Forms and records - what a request is made of: field types, the checks that hold before it is saved, the three ways to work the same records, and where a form can open.
- Automation and orchestration - what runs without anybody: triggers, the nodes a scenario is built from, installing your own, and long-running scenarios that survive a restart.
- AI in processes - describing a process in words and getting one, and the agent as a step inside a running scenario.
- Under the hood - how the two engines work, what is guaranteed and what is bounded on purpose.