Who this is for. Everyone.
Every message that arrives in the connected mailbox runs through the same sequence. Knowing the sequence is what lets you read a message that was not answered and say which step stopped it.
The terms used here are defined in Key Concepts.
The stages
Table 1. The processing sequence.
Stage |
What happens |
What it produces |
|---|---|---|
1. Ingestion |
The agent monitors the connected shared mailbox continuously and takes in each new message with its attachments. |
A logged message, visible in the mailbox. |
2. Sender classification |
The agent identifies the sender against supplier contact records, employee contacts, and domain matching. |
A sender type, which sets what the agent is permitted to do in reply. |
3. Intent detection |
The agent analyzes the message content and attachments to work out what is being asked. |
A business intent, or a record that no intent could be detected. |
4. Action |
The agent carries out the outcome configured for that intent, within what the sender type allows. |
A reply, a document transfer, or a task. |
5. Exception handling |
Anything the agent cannot complete is labeled and raised. |
A labeled message and a task in the queue. |
Ingestion
The agent connects to a designated shared accounts payable mailbox and monitors it continuously. Supported mailbox types are Gmail and Microsoft 365. Every message is taken in and logged before any classification happens, so a message that was never answered is still on record.
Use a mailbox dedicated to accounts payable. A mailbox that also carries unrelated correspondence gives the agent more to classify and produces more messages with no detected intent.
Sender classification
Before reading what a message asks for, the agent establishes who sent it. It matches the sender against supplier contact records and configured employee contacts, and falls back to domain matching where no contact record matches.
The result is one of seven sender types, listed in Key Concepts. The type is an authorization boundary: it decides whether the agent may quote supplier detail back, not merely how the message is labeled. A message from an unknown sender receives a reply that carries no supplier information, and mail classified as System is not replied to at all.
Where exact contact matching is too strict for your data, relaxed matching can be configured so that a domain match alone qualifies a sender for automated processing.
Intent detection
The agent analyzes the message body and its attachments to determine the business intent, using language models together with finance-specific models. For invoice and credit memo submissions it also checks that attachments are present and of a supported file type.
A message that does not resolve to a supported intent is recorded without a detected intent. It is not discarded: it appears in the mailbox and in the dashboard counts, and your settings decide whether it raises a task.
Action
What the agent does next depends on the intent and on what you configured in Intents and Outcomes. Three paths behave differently enough to be worth describing.
Status and remittance requests
For a payment status, purchase order status, or remittance advice request from an authorized sender, the agent queries the system of record and replies with what it finds. A payment status reply can carry remittance advice attached as CSV or PDF. Where the query returns nothing, the agent records that no matching records were found rather than replying with an empty result.
Invoice and credit memo submissions
The agent checks the attachment against documents already submitted, using the file hash together with the extracted document number, date, and amount. What follows depends on that check:
Unique document. The agent transfers it onward for processing, either directly to Workday OCR or by forwarding it to your intake mailbox, depending on how your tenant is configured.
Duplicate detected. The agent labels the message and raises a task, rather than submitting the document a second time.
Attachment missing or unsupported. The agent labels the message and raises a task.
Record updates and short pay inquiries
Requests to change vendor details, and questions about why a payment was short, are raised as tasks for a person. The agent gathers the relevant records but does not resolve these on its own.
Exception handling
Where the agent cannot complete a message, because information is missing, an attachment cannot be read, or its confidence is too low, it labels the message and creates a task. Labels such as NeedsHumanAttention make the reason visible in the mailbox, and the task carries the message into the queue so the work is not lost.
Nothing is silently dropped. A message the agent could not act on is still ingested, classified as far as it got, labeled, and counted.