Why use automated rules
Automated rules replace recurring admin work — assigning onboarding content to new hires, keeping a "Senior Engineers" group accurate as people are promoted, enrolling everyone in security operations into quarterly compliance training — with a single rule that runs on a schedule and applies an action to whoever matches a condition.
Rules are a good fit when the work is recurring and the people the action should apply to can be expressed as a People Segment. Rules are not the right fit for one-off assignments (just assign directly), for logic that segments can't express, or for workflows that need human review before the action is taken — rules apply their action automatically.
How automated rules work
Every rule has three parts:
Name — uniquely identifies the rule. Optionally, add a Description for context, and use the Enable toggle to pause the rule without deleting it.
Condition — the People Segment the rule applies to. Everyone who matches the segment is the population the action runs against.
Action — what the rule does for each person who matches. There are nine actions to choose from. See the Choose an action section below.
Rules evaluate on a scheduled cadence — by default, once daily at midnight UTC, after the periodic People Integration sync completes. Admins can change the cadence in system settings. Rules run sequentially in the order defined on the Automated Rules dashboard.
A manually triggered PI sync from the PI Syncs dashboard runs the sync only — it does not trigger rules.
For the full mechanics of evaluation, ordering, manual triggers, and editing behavior, see Reference: How automated rules run.
Choose an action
Pick the action based on what you want to happen when a person matches the segment:
Add/remove badges from users — grants or removes a badge. See How to automate badge assignments.
Add/remove users to a mentorship program — adds someone as a mentor or mentee in a program, or removes them. See How to automate mentorship program assignments.
Assign a content item — assigns a track, article, video, course, guide, or event series. See How to automate content assignments.
Assign to a group — syncs a single group's membership to a segment. See How to automate group management.
Assign to group(s) by template — creates and manages multiple groups dynamically based on a name template that pulls from user attributes. See How to automate group management.
Enroll into all upcoming events of a track — for each event series in the track, enrolls people into the next upcoming event of that series. Skips a series entirely for users who have any prior enrollment in it. See How to automate event enrollments.
Enroll into an upcoming scheduled offering of a track — enrolls people into the next scheduled instance of a track. See How to automate scheduled track enrollments.
Enroll to an upcoming event of a recurring event series — enrolls people into the next upcoming event in a series, allowing re-enrollment across occurrences. See How to automate event enrollments.
Enroll to an upcoming event of an event series — enrolls people into the next upcoming event in a series, skipping anyone previously enrolled in any event of the series. See How to automate event enrollments.
A few cross-cutting notes:
Content assignment compared to event enrollment. When the content item is an event series, Assign a content item assigns the series only — it doesn't enroll anyone into a specific event. Use one of the enrollment actions to do that. People can be both assigned and enrolled, and pairing the two (one rule to assign the parent track, a second to enroll into its events) is often the right setup.
Group sync compared to group templating. Assign to a group keeps one group's membership accurate. Assign to group(s) by template generates groups on the fly from user attributes — useful when the set of groups itself depends on data, such as one group per office or one group per manager.
Recurring compared to non-recurring event series enrollment. The two single-event enrollment actions differ in how they treat prior enrollment in the series. "Recurring" describes the action's behavior, not a property of the series — see the action descriptions above, and How to automate event enrollments for the full detail.
Set up your first rule
Identify the workflow you want to automate, and decide which action above corresponds to it.
Create a People Segment to express the condition.
For more on segments, see How to use dashboard segments.Create the rule from the Automated Rules dashboard, setting the name, segment, and action.
For the step-by-step procedure, see How to create an automated rule.
Operate
Once a rule is published, the Automated Rules dashboard is where you manage it:
Reorder rules by dragging — rules run sequentially top to bottom, so order them so that earlier rules set up the conditions later rules depend on.
Disable a rule with its Enable toggle to pause it without losing its configuration. Disabling a rule does not undo changes the rule previously applied.
Run a single rule outside the normal cadence using its manual trigger on the dashboard.
Edit a rule's name, description, segment, or action. Changes take effect at the next scheduled evaluation — editing does not trigger an immediate re-run. Use the manual trigger to re-run immediately with the updated configuration.
For deeper mechanics, see Reference: How automated rules run.