How to Build a Smart Onboarding Agent with Tasks.do and Automation

Onboarding is a critical process, whether it's for a new employee joining the team or a new customer using your product. Yet, it's often a chaotic mix of spreadsheets, forgotten emails, and manual follow-ups. Steps get missed, inconsistencies creep in, and the experience suffers. What if you could guarantee a perfect, consistent onboarding process every single time?

The solution is to treat onboarding not as an administrative checklist, but as a programmable workflow. By building a "Smart Onboarding Agent," you can automate the entire sequence of tasks, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. This article will show you how to build such an agent using an API-first approach with Tasks.do.

The Problem with Manual Onboarding

Before we dive into the code, let's pinpoint the pain points of traditional onboarding:

• Inconsistency: The process varies depending on who's running it.
• Error-Prone: It's human nature to forget a step, like granting access to a critical system or sending a welcome kit.
• Lack of Visibility: It's difficult to know where someone is in the process without manually checking in.
• Poor Scalability: Onboarding one person is tedious. Onboarding ten simultaneously is a logistical nightmare.

The root cause of these issues is treating a critical business process as a series of manual actions. The solution is to redefine it as code.

The Power of Task Management as Code

This is where Tasks.do shines. Traditional task management tools are built around a user interface, with an API added as an afterthought. Tasks.do flips this model. It's an API-first task management service, designed from the ground up to be a programmable building block.

This "Task Management as Code" philosophy allows you to:

• Automate: Trigger task creation from any event in your system.
• Integrate: Embed task management directly into your CI/CD pipelines, CRM, or HR software.
• Standardize: Define your workflows in code, making them versionable, testable, and perfectly repeatable.

By treating tasks as a programmable resource, you embrace the concept of business as code, transforming operational processes into reliable, automated services.

Building Your Smart Onboarding Agent: A Step-by-Step Guide

Let's build an agent that automates the onboarding for a new software developer joining your company.

Step 1: Define the Trigger

First, decide what event kicks off the onboarding workflow. This could be:

• A webhook from your HR system (like Greenhouse or Workday) when a candidate's status changes to "Hired."
• A new user being added to a specific user group in your identity provider (like Okta or Azure AD).
• A simple, manually-run script for smaller teams.

For our example, we'll assume we have a function that's triggered with the new hire's information.

Step 2: Map the Onboarding Workflow

Next, list all the tasks required. A good onboarding plan involves multiple departments.

IT Department Tasks:

• Provision a new laptop.
• Create email and system accounts.

Engineering Team Tasks:

• Grant access to GitHub repositories.
• Set up the local development environment.
• Schedule a team introduction meeting.

HR Department Tasks:

• Complete benefits enrollment.
• Review company policies.

Step 3: Translate the Workflow into Code

Now, let's turn that list into a function using the Tasks.do SDK. We'll create a simple onboarding agent that takes the new hire's details and creates all the necessary tasks, assigning them to the right people with appropriate due dates.

import { tasks } from '@do-sdk/server';

// Define the onboarding tasks as a template
const onboardingTemplate = [
  {
    title: 'Provision new developer laptop',
    assignee: 'it@example.com',
    priority: 'high',
    tags: ['it', 'hardware'],
    dueInDays: 2,
  },
  {
    title: 'Grant access to GitHub repositories',
    assignee: 'engineering-lead@example.com',
    priority: 'high',
    tags: ['dev', 'access'],
    dueInDays: 1,
  },
  {
    title: 'Complete HR paperwork',
    assignee: 'hr@example.com', // This task could also be assigned to the new hire
    priority: 'normal',
    tags: ['hr', 'paperwork'],
    dueInDays: 5,
  },
  {
    title: 'Schedule team introduction meeting',
    assignee: 'hiring-manager@example.com',
    priority: 'normal',
    tags: ['team', 'meeting'],
    dueInDays: 3,
  }
];

// The Onboarding Agent function
async function runOnboardingAgent(newHire: { name: string; email: string; manager: string }) {
  console.log(`Starting onboarding for ${newHire.name}...`);

  for (const taskTemplate of onboardingTemplate) {
    // Calculate the due date
    const dueDate = new Date();
    dueDate.setDate(dueDate.getDate() + taskTemplate.dueInDays);
    const dueDateString = dueDate.toISOString().split('T')[0]; // Format as 'YYYY-MM-DD'

     // Dynamically replace placeholders in the title
    const taskTitle = `${taskTemplate.title} for ${newHire.name}`;

    const newTask = await tasks.create({
      title: taskTitle,
      description: `Task for new hire: ${newHire.name}. Please complete by the due date.`,
      priority: taskTemplate.priority as 'high' | 'normal',
      assignee: taskTemplate.assignee.replace('hiring-manager@example.com', newHire.manager),
      dueDate: dueDateString,
      tags: ['onboarding', ...taskTemplate.tags],
    });

    console.log(`- Created task '${taskTitle}' with ID: ${newTask.id}`);
  }

  console.log(`Onboarding for ${newHire.name} is now fully automated and tracked!`);
}

// --- Example Trigger ---
runOnboardingAgent({
  name: 'Alex Doe',
  email: 'alex.doe@example.com',
  manager: 'manager-jane@example.com'
});

In this example, our agent iterates through a predefined template of programmable tasks. It dynamically sets titles, calculates due dates, and assigns tasks to the correct teams. Every new hire now gets the exact same, robust onboarding experience.

Beyond Onboarding: Where Else Can You Use Automated Tasks?

The power of a task management API extends far beyond onboarding. Once you start thinking of tasks as programmable components, you can automate any multi-step process:

• Bug Triage: An alert from your error-tracking tool automatically creates a "Investigate Bug" task and assigns it to the on-call developer.
• Customer Support Escalation: A support ticket tagged as "urgent" or "complex" automatically generates a task for a Tier 2 engineer with all the relevant context.
• CI/CD Pipeline Notifications: A failed deployment in your pipeline can create a high-priority task assigned to the dev team, including a link to the failed build log.
• Sales Follow-ups: A new lead in your CRM can trigger a series of tasks for a sales representative: "Initial Contact," "Send Proposal," "Schedule Demo."

Accomplish More with Automation

Manual task management is a bottleneck. It doesn't scale, it's prone to error, and it creates administrative overhead that slows your team down.

By adopting an API-first platform like Tasks.do, you transform task management from a chore into a powerful engine for workflow automation. You build reliable, repeatable, and scalable business processes directly into your software stack.

Ready to stop chasing checklists and start automating your success? Learn more and get started with Tasks.do today.