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Question about field agents, and automation execution

  • October 4, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 95 views

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Hello all,

I'm encountering an automation issue that I thought adding a delay action would resolve—allowing sufficient time for all record data to populate before triggering the email.

 

The setup: Our work order base captures information and automatically emails the assigned technician. While most fields transfer correctly, two field agent fields consistently fail to appear: "Job Name" and "Scope of Work."

 

The first field:

 

The second field:

 

The workflow is: The PM manually enters the Scope of Work, which then populates both the Job Name and Job Summary fields. These should all be included in the technician's email.

The inconsistency: Manual testing of the automation shows all fields displaying correctly, but live submissions of new work orders result in missing Job Name and SOW data. I need the automation to run reliably without manual triggering, and populate those fields to the technician

 

 

Email output: 

 

Message body:

Any insights into what might be causing this? What am I doing wrong? 

3 replies

Alexey_Gusev
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Hi,
usually ‘When record created’ trigger not used, unless the record created by some procedure with all data filled at the moment of creation.
When automation starts, created record with it’s state (all values empty) saved and used in tokens you inserted in mail. Delay doesn’t matter. You can add a workaround by Updating this record after delay (update any field, maybe even dummy checkbox created only for this purpose). 
They you can use data from this Update step, and values will match the record state at the time updated.
Actually, that’s a wrong way.

You should consider other type of trigger, to start in correct time. For example ‘When record matches condition: Job Name and Job Summary fields are not empty.” . Optionally, it can be ‘When record updated” - it depends whether anybody can update  Scope of Work, that updates Job Name and Job Summary fields and new letter will be sent - but I doubt you want new letter each time something changed in record. 

Note, when using ‘When record matches condition’, try to avoid setting manual text field as last in condition list, because it will run right after you fill first letter in field, until you finish the word.
Job Name and Job Summary fields are filled by AI and it puts whole value together, so it’s OK to use them.


TheTimeSavingCo
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Hmm, could I confirm that ‘Find Records’ step looking for the Job record that was just created, and that the Send Email step is using the result of the Find Record step?  If not, try that, should sort it out

When the record is first generated the Field Agent fields aren’t populated yet, and so the automation doesn’t have the data to work with.  By looking for the record after the delay, we grab the newly populated Field Agent data to use for the automation, does that make sense?

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If that doesn’t work, instead of using a Field Agent, what if you used an AI step in your automation instead?  And so it’d be:

  1. AI step to generate text
  2. Update record with that text
  3. Send email with that text

mtrebinonixon

Hey ​@krtphr,

 

Here I’ve recorded a little video showing how I would go about solving this issue:

 

How to make sure your automation runs with complete record data | Airtable Community Answers - Watch Video

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Best,

Matt Nixon