workflow

American  

[wurk-floh] / ˈwɜrkˌfloʊ /

noun

• workflows
  plural

1. the flow or amount of work to and from an office, department, or employee.

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Usage

What is a workflow? A workflow is most often a series of repeatable steps in completing a work project, such as creating a product (like a computer) or performing a service (like writing an article). For example, the steps in writing a news article might include:

1. Receive an assignment from your editor.
2. Research the topic.
3. Interview people involved.
4. Write an outline of the article.
5. Write the article.
6. Edit the article.
7. Hand in the article to your editor.

When a workflow involves more than one person, it will describe all the steps to be done as well as who will do them. It might also describe how long each step should take, where any physical objects should be moved to (as in manufacturing), and other details important to managing the workflow. Workflow is also the amount of work one or more workers or an entire organization has at one time, as in The machine shop’s workflow was so high that they hired temporary help. Example: The consultant was able to change the steps in our manufacturing workflow, and now we are sending out product orders on time.

Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• workflows
  plural

Etymology

Origin of workflow

First recorded in 1945–50; work + flow

Explanation

The step-by-step process you use to get a task done is workflow. You may not want to interrupt your workflow in the middle of the day, but it's important to eat lunch! While bosses and workers have always had some concept of the idea of workflow — the series or pattern of steps from the beginning of a work project to the end — this term didn't emerge until the mid-20th century. Originally, workflow was used to describe the process of manufacturing and factory work, while today it's often used in the context of office work. Do you have a routine process for completing homework assignments? Then that's your workflow.

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

workflow workflows

Gartner expects the cost of a single agentic workflow to rise more than fivefold through 2028.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 3, 2026

ServiceNow was founded as Glidesoft in 2003 by Fred Luddy as a cloud-based software company that manages business workflow systems for HR, IT and customer service operations.

From Los Angeles Times ● Aug. 1, 2026

If a company leaves a supplier, do its data and workflow go with it?

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 27, 2026

“This agentic enterprise is being led by ServiceNow from workflow to cybersecurity,” CEO Bill McDermott told MarketWatch.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 22, 2026

Their customized workflow allowed them to observe protein interactions directly inside intact cells rather than relying only on samples that had been broken apart.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 21, 2026

Run a few of those workflows at once and the machine never goes quiet, especially before a deadline.

From MarketWatch ● Sep. 3, 2026

The startup is putting the onus on providing local teams of so-called forward-deployed engineers, who help integrate its AI tools into workflows, often operating at customer sites around the world.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Sep. 2, 2026

The three that matter most are proprietary data, redesigned workflows and organizational capabilities.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 31, 2026

The fusion of a reasoning model with a capable harness allows the model to connect to real systems, execute code and manage workflows, according to Anthropic.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 24, 2026

An agentic Siri will need to go beyond chatbot capabilities to retrieve personalized context on devices and execute multistep workflows.

From MarketWatch ● Aug. 20, 2026