Meet Umbraco Automate: What It Is and What You Can Do With It

Digital teams spend a lot of time on repetitive tasks. Sending notifications, routing approvals, moving information between systems, following up on form submissions, and managing content processes all take time away from higher-value work.

Umbraco Automate brings those processes directly into Umbraco.

Automate is an open-source, drag-and-drop automation tool that lets teams create workflows using triggers, conditions, and actions. It gives organizations a way to automate everyday processes within Umbraco and connect them with the other platforms and tools they use.

For marketing teams, content editors, developers, and digital teams, that opens up a lot of possibilities.

What Is Umbraco Automate?

At its simplest, Umbraco Automate allows you to create "if this happens, then do that" workflows inside Umbraco.

An event triggers an automation, and Umbraco performs one or more actions in response.

For example:

A customer submits a form → notify the sales team → update another system → send a follow-up email.

Or:

An editor uploads an image → use AI to generate ALT text → send it for review → continue the publishing workflow once approved.

Workflows are built through a visual drag-and-drop interface in the Umbraco backoffice. They can be as simple as sending a notification or involve multiple steps, systems, and teams.

What Can You Automate?

There are plenty of ways organizations can use Automate, but a few areas stand out.

1. Content and Approval Workflows

Content teams often spend time on tasks surrounding content creation rather than the content itself. Automate can handle some of that work by triggering actions when content is created or updated, notifying people when something needs attention, processing uploaded media, or moving content through approval steps.

For organizations with multiple editors, departments, or approval requirements, this can also create a more consistent process. The right people can be notified automatically, outstanding approvals can be escalated, and additional actions can happen once content is approved.

2. Forms and Lead Management

A form submission doesn't have to end with information sitting in Umbraco waiting for someone to find it.

Automate can use a submission to start a larger process:

Form submitted → notify sales → send information to another platform → trigger a follow-up action.

This can reduce manual handoffs and help teams respond to leads and customer requests faster.

3. Customer and Commerce Experiences

Automate can also support processes tied to customer activity.

A new customer registration could trigger an onboarding process, send an email, alert an internal team, or update another system.

For organizations using Umbraco Commerce, workflows can respond to orders, promotions, and inventory activity. That might include alerting a team when inventory gets low, tagging orders based on certain criteria, or sending commerce information to another business system.

4. Internal Notifications

Not every automation needs to involve a complicated workflow.

Sometimes the biggest improvement is simply making sure the right person knows when something happens.

Automate can trigger notifications when content needs attention, a workflow is rejected, a form is submitted, or an automated process fails.

Instead of relying on someone to repeatedly check Umbraco, the information can come to them.

Bringing AI Into Your Workflows

Automate also creates opportunities to incorporate AI into existing processes without making AI a separate step or tool for your team.

AI could be used to:

• Generate ALT text for uploaded images

• Summarize long-form content

• Transcribe media

• Generate SEO-related content

• Categorize or process content

These actions can be combined with other workflow steps, including human review.

For example, a team could upload campaign images and have Automate generate ALT text, process the assets, and notify an editor to review the results before anything is published.

AI becomes part of the workflow rather than another tool someone has to remember to use.

Where Should You Start?

You don't need to overhaul every process at once.

A good place to start is with the work your team is already doing manually. Look for tasks that happen frequently, require information to be moved between systems, involve repetitive notifications or approvals, or depend on someone regularly checking whether something has happened.

Ask:

• What are we doing manually over and over?

• Where are we moving information between systems?

• Which approvals regularly slow things down?

• What events require someone to notify another team?

• Where could AI take care of a repetitive content task?

Even a small automation can make a difference when the same task happens hundreds or thousands of times.

Getting More From Umbraco with Automate

Umbraco Automate gives organizations another way to get more out of their CMS by connecting the work happening in Umbraco with the people, processes, and platforms around it.

For teams already using Umbraco, it's an opportunity to look at everyday processes and identify where automation could save time, reduce manual work, and create a more consistent experience.

At Marcel Digital, we help organizations build and optimize Umbraco solutions around their business needs. If you're interested in Umbraco Automate, we can help identify opportunities for automation, connect Umbraco with your existing technology stack, and build workflows around the way your team actually works.

Frequently Asked Questions