In today's fast-paced digital landscape, business logic is often a tangled web of scripts, microservices, and third-party API calls. This complexity slows down development, creates brittle systems, and makes automation a constant struggle. What if you could define any business task—from sending an email to running a complex data analysis—as a simple, reusable, and instantly executable API?
This is the promise of Actions.do: a platform designed to help you transform your business processes into Actions as Code, for Results as Software.
By encapsulating tasks into standardized building blocks, you can move beyond simple scripting and start building powerful, intelligent, and scalable agentic workflows. In this guide, we'll explore what these workflows are and walk you through building your first one.
An agentic workflow isn't just a linear sequence of steps. It's an intelligent, adaptable process capable of making decisions, handling errors, and executing tasks to achieve a specific goal. Think of it as giving a smart AI agent a toolbox; each tool in that box is an Action.
With the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI agents, there's a growing need for a reliable bridge between digital intelligence and real-world execution. An AI can decide to refund a customer, but it needs a secure, standardized tool to actually process that refund. This is where Actions.do shines, providing the essential building blocks for this new paradigm of Services-as-Software.
Before building a workflow, you need to understand its fundamental unit.
What is an Action? In the context of Actions.do, an Action is a single, discrete business task (e.g., sending a notification, updating a database, calling a third-party API) encapsulated as a reusable, API-callable service.
You might think, "Isn't that just a serverless function?" While technically similar under the hood, Actions are purpose-built for business logic. They abstract away infrastructure concerns and come with critical features out-of-the-box:
With Actions, you stop worrying about the how (servers, scaling, boilerplate) and focus entirely on the what (the business value you're delivering).
Let's make this concrete with a common e-commerce scenario. When a customer places an order, we want to create a workflow that:
With Actions.do, you would first define each of these as an independent Action: check-inventory, process-payment, and send-order-confirmation. You can create new Actions easily using our developer SDK in TypeScript or Python.
Once an Action is defined, executing it is as simple as a single API call. For example, here’s how you would trigger the final step of our workflow—sending the confirmation email:
import { dotdo } from '@do-sdk';
// Initialize the .do client with your API key
const client = dotdo.init({ apiKey: 'your-secret-api-key' });
// Execute a pre-defined action by its name with a specific payload
const result = await client.actions.execute({
name: 'send-order-confirmation',
payload: {
customerId: 'cust_1a2b3c',
orderId: 'ord_4d5e6f'
}
});
console.log('Action executed successfully:', result);
// Expected output: { success: true, messageId: 'msg_xyz789' }
Executing a single Action is powerful, but the real magic happens when you Orchestrate. Execute. Automate.
Actions are designed to be composed into sequences. Using our platform, you can visually or programmatically chain these Actions together to create your complete workflow. This orchestration layer can handle the conditional logic:
This composed sequence is more than just a script; it's a robust, observable, and scalable business process delivered as a single service.
Building automated systems inevitably leads to a critical question: what happens when things go wrong?
Actions.do is built with production realities in mind.
By breaking down complex processes into simple, composable API Actions, you fundamentally change how you build and automate. Fragile scripts become resilient services. Monolithic business logic becomes a flexible library of reusable capabilities.
This is the core of Business-as-Code. You are no longer just writing code; you are building a catalog of executable business assets ready to be orchestrated into powerful agentic workflows.
Ready to turn your business tasks into triumphant automations?
Get started with Actions.do today and build your first Action in minutes.