We have multiple AI automations on our board that run with triggers. For example, we use a group in one of our boards as a “email inbox”, so its connected with an email account. Whenever a new email comes, an item is created. In this group/board, we have multiple AI automations to categorize and extract information from this initial email; like, “priority level”, “name of the sender”, “summary” etc. The current problem is that most of these are triggered with the “when an update is created…” automation. This means that whenever someone puts another update on an existing update (additionally to the first update), ALL of the automations re-run again and overwrite the previous values. This is kind of inefficient from a computational point and management point as well because sometimes whenever we think AI made a mistake we manually change a value. However, as soon as there is another update made, our manual intervention is also overwritten.
What I want to know is if there is any way to add another limitation to this automation template. One can be “When an update is created AND ONLY if there is no existing column value…” or “…AND ONLY if the column value is ‘Not defined’” etc.
That’s a great use case - I can see why the repeated re-triggering is causing problems. Unfortunately, most built-in automation templates (like “When an update is created”) don’t yet allow conditional checks like “only if value is empty / not defined”.
That said, you have a couple of options:
Custom Conditions (if supported) – Some boards let you add extra conditions in the automation builder (e.g., “Only run if column X is empty”). If your platform doesn’t show that, it might not be available natively.
External Automation Layer – Tools like n8n or Zapier give you more flexibility. You could trigger on “update created”, but add a filter step like “only continue if column = null/empty” before calling the AI automation.
Manual Override Column – Another workaround is to add a column like Locked/Reviewed. Your automation could include a condition to check if Locked is set to Yes, and if so, skip running AI. This way your manual edits aren’t overwritten.
It’s not perfect, but combining a conditional filter with a manual lock usually works well in practice.
I’ve built similar AI-driven workflows — you can check out my experiments here: https://zaytrics.com