Meet Umbraco Automate

Umbraco has always been extensible and flexible. But Umbraco Automate now puts even more of this power in the hands of the web content and editorial teams specifically, not just the developers.

Automation in Umbraco has traditionally involved a developer writing the hooks, building the connections and maintaining the integrations that make a website do everything it needs to within a business.

Some of this workflow meant a developer sitting between an editorial team and the various processes they own. The good news is that Umbraco Automate, as announced at Codegarden, is set to give even greater control to the people managing content day to day.

At CTI Digital, we have always believed that editorial teams should have as much control as possible over the content they manage. Every Umbraco build we deliver is designed with that in mind. And Automate is a significant step in the same direction.

What is Umbraco Automate?

Umbraco Automate brings no-code automation directly into the Umbraco Backoffice.

If you have used Zapier or Power Automate, the idea will be familiar. The difference is where it lives. Rather than sitting in a separate tool, Automate sits inside the CMS your team already works in every day.

It has been designed for content editors, marketers and site administrators rather than developers. Workflows are built through a simple visual interface and can be started by events inside Umbraco or outside it. As long as an external system supports webhooks, a change in that system can kick off a workflow in your CMS.

How can Umbraco Automate help your team?

Every content team has repetitive, manual tasks that slow production down or sit in a developer's backlog waiting for attention.

Take a common example. Many teams still download CSV files from Umbraco Forms and import the submissions into their CRM by hand. With Automate, that can happen automatically every time a form is submitted, provided your CRM supports API integration.

Or consider content governance. Rather than relying on someone remembering to check, you can schedule regular reviews of specific pages, flag content that may be out of date and notify the right people when it needs attention.

None of this is glamorous, that's precisely the point. When the routine work takes care of itself, your team gets time back for the things that actually matter (like better content and experiences).

How Umbraco Automate works

The model is deliberately simple.

Every workflow starts with a trigger, followed by a series of actions to complete the job.

Triggers and actions. That’s the whole idea, and it is enough to take a surprising amount of routine work off your team's plate. Triggers can be the publication or updating of content, a new member registration, a HubSpot lead event, a payment processed; and then actions might feature an alert, running an AI or moving data between systems.

Can you extend Umbraco Automate?

Yes. As with everything in Umbraco, flexibility is built in.

Automate ships with a range of out-of-the-box features that cover the most common automation needs. But no two businesses run in quite the same way, and the processes that matter most are often the ones that are specific to your organisation.

So, where you need something more tailored, custom actions can be developed to integrate with your own systems and reflect the way your team actually works. Whether you are adapting an existing process or building something entirely new, you are not limited to what comes in the box.

This is where the right development partner earns its keep, creating a simple, visual tool for editors, and providing the business with workflows built around its real processes, not a generic template.

Does Umbraco Automate work with AI?

It does, and in line with Umbraco’s deliberate modular approach to AI, which at CTI we believe is the right one.

Rather than bolting on a single AI model and hoping for the best, Umbraco gives you control over which models you use, when you use them and what they are allowed to do.

Automate builds on that foundation with AI-powered actions that can process, manage and work with content directly inside your workflows. Crucially, those actions respect the rules and governance you have already set in Umbraco AI. You choose the right model for each task, and AI is used where it adds value rather than everywhere simply because it can be.

That matters. The question is no longer just what AI can do. It is what AI can access, what it can act upon and who is accountable for it. Automate gives you a way to answer those questions inside your CMS, rather than leaving them to chance.

Keeping automation accountable

Automation saves time but of course it does not replace judgement.

Accuracy, tone of voice and brand consistency still matter, arguably more so when content is moving faster. That is why Umbraco Automate supports human-in-the-loop approval steps, so routine work can be automated while your team stays in control of the outcome.

In practice, that might mean a workflow that uses an LLM to generate or process content, then pauses for an editor to review and approve the result before anything moves on. You get the efficiency of automation and the confidence of human oversight.

Ultimately, when teams trust the guardrails, they are far more willing to use the tools.

Getting started with Umbraco Automate

Umbraco Automate is available from Umbraco 17.

For most organisations, the CMS has been somewhere content is stored and published. Automate turns it into something more active: a platform that handles routine, repetitive and integration tasks so your people can focus on what matters most, creating high-quality content and engaging your audience.

The technology is the easy part. The real value comes from understanding which of your processes are worth automating, how they connect to the rest of your systems and where human oversight needs to sit.

As a long-standing Umbraco partner, that is exactly where CTI Digital can help. Find out more about our CMS websites work, or get in touch to talk through what Automate could do for your team.