The AI era is revolutionizing many fields, the most widely heard of in the media are image, text and video content generation. However, very close after these fields comes workflow and business automation. New AI enabled tools like Zapier, and n8n open the field to many non-professionals and enhance the abilities of professionals to create more capable flows. For years, Business Process Automation (BPA) was built on rigid, "if-this-then-that" rules. But what if the "if" was a complex, data-driven insight that a human might miss? This is where a new wave of AI-enabled tools is creating an explosion in the field, transforming passive data into proactive action. This is a story of how a new generation of tools is not just automating tasks, but automating intelligence itself.
The Shift in BI & Embedded Analytics from Passive Insights to Proactive Triggers
Traditional analytics platforms have long been the domain of passive reporting. They show you what happened, but they don’t tell you what to do about it. Modern AI-enabled platforms are changing this by acting as the central nervous system of a business, connecting data insights directly to automated workflows. Additionally, it is now possible to write some code using AI assistants even without being a software engineer.
The challenge: a lot of KPIs to monitor and handle
Everyone is expected to be more efficient nowadays, and this leads managers and decision makers to have to actively monitor multiple KPIs and dashboards repeatedly just to make sure that everything is within reason.
This is where a solution like Sisense Fusion Pulse emerges as a critical player. Sisense, a leader in analytics, should no longer be considered just for creating dashboards; it's a powerful engine that can help in transitioning into a new era of proactive automation.
How Sisense Fusion Pulse Drives Intelligent Automation
Sisense Fusion Pulse is an alerting system that monitors key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time. Instead of relying on a human to spot a data anomaly, you can set up a "data-trigger" that acts as the starting gun for an automated workflow.
For example, imagine a retail company tracking weekly sales performance. A data trigger can be configured to fire when a key widget on a dashboard shows that "Weekly Sales" has dropped below the company's predefined minimum threshold.
This trigger, powered by a simple webhook, can then become the catalyst for an advanced business process automation flow. While there isn't a native, out-of-the-box connector for every tool, Sisense provides developers with APIs and webhooks that make integration seamless.
Here is what that automated workflow might look like, using a tool like n8n:
- The Trigger (Sisense): The “Regional Sales" metric on a Sisense dashboard hits the minimum company threshold, triggering an event and starting the handling process using a webhook.
- The Automation (Zapier/n8n): The webhook is received by the automation platform, which then initiates a multi-step process.
- The Action:
- Receiving the Pulse: The Pulse trigger is received via a webhook
- Analyzing the message: a simple script - generated using one of the AI chat
- Automatically sends an alert to the sales management team's Slack channel, including the region and the sales figures. The analysis step identifies the region and the severity of the drop.
- Routing the notification: The routing step is based on the priority and the region details of that specific pulse. It is used to determine whether the sales executive should also be notified. It also includes preparation of the email attributes like: To, CC, Priority, Title, and Message body.
- Communicating it: This step uses Gmail to send the message that was prepared to the relevant recipients.
- The result:
- The automation process worked, and the “executions” are recorded in the n8n application
- The resulting email message includes the identification of the regional manager, and I sent him an email with the summary
By connecting data-driven insights from Sisense to the automation capabilities of platforms like n8n, the business moves from reactive to proactive. An inefficiency is no longer a problem a human has to discover and act on; it's a trigger for an intelligent, automated response.
A little about the tools and the development process
- Preparing the data & dashboard widgets
I started with modeling the data in Sisense, and then I created a dashboard in the analytics tab.
2. Defining Pulse data triggers
I selected each region and added a pulse data trigger for it.
I chose a data trigger of a threshold condition. Here, the condition was a drop of weekly sales in the east region below $2000.
I chose the webhook option for the communication channel. I just pasted the URL from n8n’s webhook node.
- I waited for the condition to become fulfilled - in this example, it was 1 hour, and then I got an error message in n8n executions. I copied the error to the AI application (claude.ai in my case), and it guided me on what I need to fix.
I was able to resolve the issues and this taught me that Sisense-pulse actually sends a JSON file with the message and that I get the details including: the Type:"kpi" , its Name: “Total Sales - East” but also, Value of the KPI, Filter - that I set to last week, and even the specific condition “< 2000”. This meant that I could use them in my logic - in my case, I added a severity analysis based on the percentage of the drop from the threshold. I defined it so that when the drop is above 20% the severity is high and the sales executive should be added as CC to the email message.
- I added the names and email addresses of the regional sales managers and of the executive sales manager on the routing step (or Node, as it is called in n8n)
- I made sure that the workflow was active, and voila! It worked.
I started getting emails from n8n based on the logic and flow.
Summary
I was able to use Sisense - Pulse to create an n8n business automation workflow that analyzes the behavior of a collection of KPIs and automatically sends a relevant message to the relevant managers. I wrote the scripts using an AI chat tool.
The Future of Work is Proactive
This new paradigm proves that the future of business process automation isn't about replacing humans, but about empowering them. By using platforms like Sisense to turn critical data points into automated actions, organizations free up their teams to focus on strategic decisions. The job is no longer to manually monitor dashboards for problems, but to design the systems that automatically fix them. This is the new frontier of work, where data, AI, and automation converge to build smarter, more resilient businesses.
This new paradigm influences the life of managers; it eliminates the hustle of constantly needing to review their KPI dashboard and following simple business rules. Now, the combination of Sisense's triggers and AI-driven automation will review and handle these cases, leaving the manager to attend to more advanced cases.
