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Hermes Agent Automation Blueprints — End-to-End AI Workflows

Hermes Agent automation blueprints provide complete, cron-anchored workflows for recurring business processes. Each blueprint orchestrates multiple tools and human decision gates to run a specific business function reliably and autonomously.

What's Inside

Blueprint File Core Process Cycle
Daily Operations daily-ops.md Morning briefing → task triage → execution monitoring → evening wrap-up Daily
Customer Lifecycle customer-lifecycle.md Onboarding → engagement → retention → win-back Continuous
Content Pipeline content-pipeline.md Research → draft → review → publish → promote Monthly
Financial Close financial-close.md Reconciliation → reporting → forecasting Monthly
Incident Response incident-response.md Detection → triage → remediation → postmortem On-demand

How Blueprints Work

Each blueprint follows a consistent structure:

CRON SCHEDULE → DATA COLLECTION → COMPUTATION → ACTION/OUTPUT → HUMAN GATE → NEXT STAGE

The Cron Foundation

Cron expressions are the heartbeat of every blueprint. They define when automations fire, creating a predictable rhythm for business processes. Key patterns:

Pattern Expression Use Case
Every N minutes */N * * * * Real-time monitoring, frequent checks
Daily at specific time 0 HH * * * Morning briefings, daily reports
Weekdays only 0 HH * * 1-5 Business-day operations
Specific day of week 0 HH * * DAY Weekly reviews, team syncs
Specific day of month 0 HH DAY * * Financial close, monthly reports
Last day of month 0 HH L * * Month-end processing

The Human Gate Pattern

Every blueprint includes explicit human decision points. Automation handles data gathering, computation, and formatting — but critical decisions require human judgment. The gates are positioned where:

  1. Approval is needed before an action with consequences (sending external communication, publishing content, closing books)
  2. Judgment is required that automation can't reliably provide (assessing creative quality, evaluating nuanced risk)
  3. Accountability matters — a person needs to sign off (financial reports, incident severity classification)

The pattern: automation prepares everything, presents a clear decision point, and awaits approval before proceeding to the next stage.

Dependency Diagram

These blueprints can operate independently, but they also compose. Here's how they relate:

                    ┌──────────────────┐
                    │ DAILY OPERATIONS │
                    │  (coordinates    │
                    │   day-to-day)    │
                    └────────┬─────────┘
                             │
         ┌───────────────────┼───────────────────┐
         │                   │                   │
┌────────▼────────┐ ┌───────▼────────┐ ┌────────▼────────┐
│ CUSTOMER        │ │ CONTENT        │ │ INCIDENT        │
│ LIFECYCLE       │ │ PIPELINE       │ │ RESPONSE        │
│ (ongoing,       │ │ (monthly       │ │ (on-demand,     │
│  feeds into     │ │  content ops)  │ │  interrupts     │
│  daily ops)     │ │                │ │  all others)    │
└────────┬────────┘ └───────┬────────┘ └────────┬────────┘
         │                   │                   │
         └───────────────────┼───────────────────┘
                             │
                    ┌────────▼────────┐
                    │ FINANCIAL CLOSE │
                    │ (monthly,       │
                    │  consumes data  │
                    │  from all)      │
                    └─────────────────┘

Composition Examples

Daily Operations + Customer Lifecycle: The daily morning briefing pulls customer health data from the lifecycle pipeline. If a high-value customer entered the "at risk" category overnight, it appears in the morning briefing as a priority item. The daily task triage automatically creates a check-in task for the account manager.

Content Pipeline + Daily Operations: The content pipeline's weekly performance sweep feeds into the daily operations briefing on Monday mornings. Content that's underperforming or overperforming is flagged. The task triage system suggests whether content needs a refresh, promotion boost, or is fine as-is.

Incident Response + Daily Operations: When an incident fires, it interrupts the daily operations flow. The scheduled briefing still runs but flags "active incident — daily brief superseded by incident channel." Post-incident, the postmortem action items are fed into daily task triage as high-priority tasks.

Financial Close + All Blueprints: The financial close consumes data from customer lifecycle (churn, expansion revenue), content pipeline (content marketing spend vs return), and daily operations (operational metrics that have cost implications). The close package then feeds forward-looking adjustments into all other blueprints for the next month.

Getting Started

Choose Your First Blueprint

Start with the blueprint that addresses your most painful manual process:

If you struggle with... Start with...
Morning context switching, forgetting tasks Daily Operations
Losing track of customers, reactive account management Customer Lifecycle
Inconsistent publishing schedule, content bottlenecks Content Pipeline
Long close cycles, reconciliation headaches Financial Close
Slow incident response, chaotic firefighting Incident Response

Implementation Order

  1. Week 1: Read the blueprint end-to-end. Understand every cron job and human gate.
  2. Week 2: Set up the MCP servers and data connections the blueprint requires.
  3. Week 3: Run the blueprint in dry-run mode — observe what it would do without executing.
  4. Week 4: Enable the first automation (the lowest-risk one). Monitor closely.
  5. Week 5-6: Enable remaining automations one at a time with 48-hour observation periods.
  6. Week 7-8: Tune thresholds, customize outputs, and refine based on what's working.

Customization Principles

These blueprints are starting points, not finished products. Every organization has different:

  • Rhythms: Your "morning" might start at 6 AM or 10 AM. Adjust cron times.
  • Systems: You might use Slack or Teams, Jira or Linear, HubSpot or Close. Adapt the tool references.
  • Thresholds: Your "urgent" threshold for revenue variance might be 1% or 5%. Calibrate to your reality.
  • Culture: Some teams want maximum automation; others want more human gates. Adjust accordingly.

Common Patterns Across Blueprints

The Data-Computer-Action Loop

Every blueprint follows this fundamental loop: 1. Pull data from connected systems on a schedule 2. Compute something useful — metrics, scores, rankings, summaries 3. Take action — post a message, create a task, update a record, send a notification 4. Log what happened for audit and improvement

Escalation Patterns

When things go wrong, blueprints escalate predictably: 1. Automated retry — transient failures get a second attempt 2. Notification — persistent failures alert a human 3. Escalation — unresolved after timeout → escalate to next level 4. Fallback — if all else fails, degrade gracefully (partial report > no report)

Health Monitoring

Every blueprint should monitor its own health: - When was the last successful run of each cron job? - Are execution times trending up (indicates growing data or performance issues)? - What's the error rate over the last 30 days? - Are human gates being approved promptly or becoming bottlenecks?

Blueprint Design Principles

1. Start with the outcome, not the automation. Design begins with "what does the human need to know or do?" — not "what can we automate?" The automation serves the outcome.

2. Automate the tedious, gate the consequential. Data gathering, formatting, computation, and routing are automated. Decisions with meaningful consequences have human gates.

3. Fail loudly. Silent automation failures are worse than no automation. If a cron job fails, someone needs to know. If data is stale, the output is marked as such. Never present uncertain output as certain.

4. Respect the existing workflow. These blueprints should enhance how your team already works, not force a complete process overhaul. Start by automating one painful step in an existing process before redesigning the entire flow.

5. Measure and improve. Track time saved, errors caught, and process speed for each blueprint. Use those metrics to justify expanding automation and to identify which parts need refinement.

Contributing

These blueprints represent generalized patterns. As you adapt them to your organization's tools and processes, you'll discover improvements — different cron cadences, additional data sources, smarter scoring models. Document what works for your context and share the patterns back with the community.

FAQ

What are Hermes Agent automation blueprints?

Automation blueprints are complete, cron-anchored workflow templates for recurring business processes. Each blueprint defines the schedule, data sources, processing logic, human decision gates, and output format for a specific function like daily operations, customer lifecycle, content production, financial close, or incident response.

How do I customize a blueprint for my organization?

Adjust cron times to match your team's working hours, replace tool references with your actual systems (Slack vs Teams, Jira vs Linear, HubSpot vs Close), and calibrate thresholds to your reality (1% vs 5% revenue variance). Start with the lowest-risk automation and enable one at a time with 48-hour observation periods.

Which blueprint should I implement first?

Start with the blueprint that addresses your most painful manual process. If morning context switching is the problem, start with Daily Operations. For reactive account management, use Customer Lifecycle. For inconsistent publishing, use Content Pipeline.

How do blueprints handle errors and failures?

Every blueprint follows a predictable escalation pattern: automated retry (transient failures), notification (persistent failures alert a human), escalation (unresolved after timeout escalates to next level), and fallback (degrade gracefully — partial report is better than no report).