Responsibilities

Responsibilities define who is accountable for work on queues and workflow phases. Unlike roles and policies (which control what you can access), responsibilities control who gets notified and assigned when work arrives.

Responsibility Roles

Each responsibility assignment has a role that determines the party's relationship to the work:

Assignable Parties

You can assign responsibilities to:

• Users — individual team members
• Agents — AI agents that can triage, analyze, or execute automatically
• Teams — all members of the team receive notifications
• Groups — all users and agents in the group receive notifications

When a team or group is assigned, the system expands the membership to notify individual users.

Where Responsibilities Apply

Queue (Inbox) Responsibilities

Assign parties to an inbox to control who gets notified when new requests arrive:

1. Go to Admin → Inboxes → select an inbox
2. Scroll to the Responsibilities section
3. Click Add Assignment → select a party and role
4. Owner: gets notified of every new request in the inbox
5. Backup: gets notified if a request sits unactioned past the escalation deadline

Workflow Phase Responsibilities

Assign parties to individual workflow phases to control who handles each step:

1. Open the Workflow Editor → select a phase
2. In the phase properties panel, scroll to Responsibilities
3. Add assignments with appropriate roles

Manual phases: Owners are notified and expected to advance the phase. Approvers must sign off before advancement.

Automated phases: If all responsible parties are agents (no human owners), the phase executes automatically. If any humans are assigned as owners, the phase waits for manual action.

Agent Autonomy Levels

When an AI agent is assigned to a phase, you configure its autonomy level:

Safe actions include creating tasks, adding comments, and updating variables. Risky actions include advancing phases, assigning tasks, and escalating.

Escalation

When a phase has an escalation deadline configured (Admin → Workflow Editor → phase settings → Escalation):

1. The phase enters active state when the workflow reaches it
2. If the phase isn't completed within the deadline, the escalation engine triggers
3. Backup parties are notified with an escalation alert
4. If no backup parties are assigned, Owner parties receive the escalation notice
5. The escalation is recorded in the request activity log

Escalation deadlines can be set in minutes with presets: 30m, 1h, 4h, 8h, 24h, 48h.

Managing Responsibilities

Using the Responsibility Editor

The Responsibility Editor appears on queue detail pages and in the workflow phase property panel:

1. Add: Click "Add Assignment" → choose party type (User, Agent, Team, Group) → select the party → choose role
2. Configure agents: For agent assignments, set autonomy level and allowed actions
3. Remove: Click the X button on any assignment to remove it
4. Priority: Assignments are ordered by role (Owner first) then by priority number

Best Practices

• Assign at least one Owner to every queue and critical workflow phase
• Use Backup assignments for SLA-sensitive phases with escalation deadlines
• Assign Agents as Contributors when you want AI analysis without automatic advancement
• Use Teams instead of individual users for shared responsibility (handles vacations/absences)
• Observers are useful for managers who need visibility without being in the action loop