Making Complex Forms Simple with AI-Powered Anvil Workflows
Anvil Workflows make it easy to manage complex forms—for both the people filling them out and those digitizing them. This is largely thanks to the variety of business rules that can be encoded into an Anvil Workflow and the components of a document flow they can be applied to—everything from which questions to ask to which documents to complete to how data is transferred to the documents can be customized in an Anvil Workflow.
The Challenges of Workflow Automation
However, the process of recreating document instructions and rules into a Workflow could be slow or confusing. Logic to show or hide questions, pages, and documents could be tedious to add via the logic panel and limited to simple statements by the UI, while more complex statements required access to the advanced editor and a knowledge of JavaScript. Writing formulas to fill PDF fields with transformed data (such as adding two numbers together) was also limited to more advanced users via the advanced editor, which lacked an easy-to-use interface.
In short, the options for non-technical users were too limited, and the options for technical users were either too slow or open-ended to be maximally efficient.
How AI Enhances Anvil Workflows
To make this better for both technical and non-technical users, Anvil made two key improvements to our Workflow builder:
- An improved UI for filling PDF fields from a formula, making it accessible to all builders. This feature allows users to transform data from the webform to the PDF, such as performing calculations or printing different values based on webform inputs.
- AI assistance for generating formulas and logic from natural language, enabling users to create more sophisticated workflows without needing advanced technical knowledge.
Takeaways
With these improvements, Anvil Workflows are now more powerful and accessible than ever. Non-technical users can easily build and customize workflows without needing to write code, while technical users can work more efficiently with AI-assisted formula generation and enhanced logic tools. By streamlining the process of transforming complex document rules into automated workflows, Anvil empowers businesses to create seamless, efficient, and intelligent document flows—making form management faster and easier for everyone involved.