Qualified applications for engineering roles dropped 38% over the past two weeks while open reqs held steady, pulling your pipeline ratio well below the 3:1 baseline. Six roles with target start dates before August have fewer than 2 candidates past the technical screen.
How an agent works
An agent watches one thing and acts on it. Not a workflow, just a standing watch that usually does nothing and acts the moment it should.
You stay in control
An agent does what you'd do, and only what you've authorized.
The same trusted numbers
It acts on the same governed metrics as your dashboards, and every action is logged and traceable.
You approve anything that writes
It alerts and recommends on its own; anything that changes data is yours to approve.
Try it on a test channel first
Point a new agent at a throwaway channel and watch its judgment before it touches anything real.
No false alarms
It remembers what it already flagged and waits before acting again, so it won't alert you about the same thing twice.
What you can put an agent on
Tie your Ashby pipeline to the plan and the budget
It reconciles your open requisitions and offer data against your headcount plan and compensation budget, and flags the gaps before the quarterly review, so the pipeline your recruiting team reports matches the roles finance approved and the dollars still available. You stop finding out a req was unfunded after the offer goes out.
Catch a stage bottleneck before it stalls the whole pipeline
When conversion between interview stages drops or time-in-stage breaks its trend, it tells you which roles, which stage, and how many candidates are stuck, then hands off to Fi to investigate whether it is a scheduling gap, a scoring pattern, or a capacity problem. You see the stall forming while there is still time to fix it.
Flag a sourcing channel that stopped converting
When a source that used to produce hires starts generating volume but no offers, it surfaces the channel, the drop-off stage, and the archive reasons behind it, so you know whether the channel degraded or the bar moved. You reallocate spend on the real conversion data, not last quarter's assumption.
Run any Python it needs to get the job done
Beyond alerts and write-backs, an agent can run arbitrary Python, so it can do whatever the task actually requires: call an API, kick off a job, reshape the data, or wire into your own tooling. The action space is yours to define.
Why not just build it yourself?
You could rig one of these with a cron job and a Slack webhook in an afternoon. The watching is the easy part. Here's what you'd own forever, and don't, here:
- →The cross-source join: not one tool's data, but it reconciled against the rest of your stack
- →A trusted, consistent metric: the same number your dashboards use
- →The investigation into why, when something fires
- →A full audit trail of everything it did
- →The upkeep, when the schema drifts or the script breaks at 2am
The data it works from
Every Ashby object, modeled and query-ready the moment you connect.
It runs on your real Ashby account (archived candidates, rejected offers, requisitions nobody closed, and all), not a tidy demo.
Where it acts
Slack
A message in the channel you choose, with the context and a button to act on it.
A summary in the inbox of the people who need to see it.
Webhook
A payload to your own systems, to wire the agent into whatever you already run.
Warehouse write-back
A flag written back to your warehouse for everything downstream to pick up.
Hand off to Fi
Kick the question to Fi to investigate the why and propose the fix.
MCP
Expose it to your own agents and tools over MCP, and drive it from your stack.
Run it in your own VPC or fully self-hosted. Everything it does is pure SQL and Python you can inspect.
Build your agents with Fi
Fi is your AI analyst. It helps you build and customize everything in Definite, including the agents that watch and act.
Fi
Your AI analyst. Ask questions in plain English, and let it help you build and customize everything in Definite, including your agents.
Meet Fi →Agents
The watchers and actors. Once you've built one, it runs on its own, keeping an eye on what matters and acting the way you would.
Autonomous agents →Get started
- 1Connect Ashby, and the sources it needs to reconcile against. Synced and modeled in an afternoon.
- 2See the numbers tie out to what you already trust.
- 3Put an agent on one thing you can't afford to miss. Fi helps you build it.