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Skills, Triggers, and Guides let Ari repeat work, so you explain a job once instead of every month, and the work happens on time even when you are not there. A Skill tells Ari how to do a job. A Trigger tells Ari when to do it. A Guide shows a person around the work, one step at a time. Take a month-end review. A Skill holds your steps: compare Actuals with Forecast for the closed month, flag any line more than 10% off, and write the summary in your usual format. A Trigger runs the review on the fifth of each month and emails you the summary. A Guide walks your board through the variance Page before the meeting.

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How Ari picks a Skill

A Skill has a name, a description, and instructions. On every request, Ari sees the name and description of each Skill it has: the built-in Skills, and your own Skills that apply in this workspace. When a request matches a description, Ari reads that Skill’s instructions and follows them. Nobody has to name the Skill. That is why a description works best when it is written as “Use when…”: it is what Ari matches against. Skills come in two kinds:
  • Built-in Skills come with cfo.ai, which keeps them up to date. Nobody can edit them. Most are always on; three optional ones, Model audit, Flash report, and Model migration tie-out, stay off until someone in the workspace turns them on.
  • Your own Skills belong to you, the person who saved them. Ari follows them whenever it works for you, in every workspace where you are a member, so a fractional CFO who saves a close review once has it in every client’s workspace. Other people in a workspace have their own Skills, and yours do not change their chats. A Skill of yours cannot reuse a built-in Skill’s name.
A Skill can also be limited to one workspace, for a procedure built on one company’s own accounts, systems, people, or figures. Ari follows a limited Skill only in that workspace. When you ask Ari to save a Skill that names one company’s own setup, it limits the Skill to that company’s workspace and tells you so. A new or changed Skill reaches a new chat at once, and a chat already open within a message or two. A Skill holds a process. A fact that everyone at a company should share, such as how the company defines bookings, belongs in workspace memory instead, which applies to every chat for everyone in the workspace; see What Ari remembers.

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How a Trigger runs with nobody watching

A Trigger is a saved request with a schedule. The schedule is stored in UTC. At each scheduled time, cfo.ai starts a new chat for the run and Ari works through the saved instructions, with the access of the person who set up the Trigger. The saved instructions are the authorization for the run. A run starts with no Page open and works in Main, unless the instructions name another Scenario. It works on exactly what the instructions name. If a Page or a connection the instructions name was renamed or removed, the run reports that instead of picking something that looks similar. Nobody reads the chat while a run works, so nobody can answer it. When Ari would ask you a question, it makes a reasonable assumption, keeps going, and states the assumption in its result. Its questions, plans, and buttons stay in the chat for you to read later. Answering one later starts a new turn in that chat; it does not change what the run already did. That turn is an ordinary chat turn, so Ari can ask you to approve a call in it.

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What a run cannot do on its own

A run never waits for a person, so anything that needs a person’s approval stops short:
  • A Scenario merge or deletion that the run prepares waits in its chat until someone presses the confirmation button.
  • An email to anyone but you waits as a preview in the chat until someone presses Send.
  • A run can message only you, by email or in Slack, and only when its instructions name that channel. It cannot post in a Slack channel.
  • A tool of an MCP server, or an endpoint of a connected API, set to Ask first does not run. No approval card appears in the run’s chat, and Ari is told that the call did not run and that no approval request was created. Set the tool or endpoint to Allow before a Trigger needs it; see Choose what Ari may do.
A Trigger does one run at a time. When a run is still going at the next scheduled time, that time is skipped. Runs use AI usage like any chat with Ari; see Plans, AI usage, and connection slots.

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The record each run keeps

Each run’s chat is its record, listed in the Trigger’s history. A run ends by reporting its outcome: the saved task was done, it was not done, with the run’s own sentence for why, or the run ended without reporting either. Only a run that reports the task done counts as a success. A Trigger that refreshes a connection succeeds only when the import that run started finishes. Each finished run also saves a summary to Ari’s memory, tagged with the Trigger and the date. You can ask Ari about earlier runs in any chat, such as “What did my cash Trigger find last month?” The next run reads the last run’s record: what it found, how long that has held, and what it already told you. A report the instructions ask for every time goes out every time. A warning goes out when something changes, so the same warning does not repeat on every run.

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Guides show people around

A Guide is a saved walkthrough that spotlights parts of the workspace, such as a Page, a block, or one cell, with a short note at each stop. A Guide can be a step-by-step tour, a walkthrough of an analysis, or a single explanation. Ari builds Guides from your description, and they are saved in the workspace for everyone. People start a saved Guide by asking Ari for it, or with the Start tour or Start walkthrough button Ari posts in the chat. A button in a Canvas block, or Take the tour on an invitation, can also start one. Saved Guides are not listed in the Help center. See Walk someone through a Page with a Guide.

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Choosing between them