Sequential Tasks

The task components allow you to give specific tasks to AI agents. Think of AI agents as additional team members for a moment. Each member has a different role, backstory, and goals. Just like a real team member, they are qualified to carry out many various tasks. Thanks to this component, you can specify and assign these tasks.

Do you have just one agent and one task? There’s no need to use task components. Simply use the agent’s goal field instead. Tasks are great for complex workflows consisting of several steps or giving several different tasks to one agent.

Tasks As A part Of Crews

Let’s say you want to create and publish a long-form blog post. You’re likely to try, and re-create a whole content team of agents. The work usually starts with an SEO specialist researching keywords and outlining the content. They’ll create an SEO brief, which will be passed on to the content writer. Once the writer is done, their colleague will proofread and edit the article to ensure quality. What about the featured images or infographics? A designer will help with that. 

You already have at least three or four people working on creating this piece of content. Each of them has their own task to perform in the sequence. Just like in a real team, you can create a team of AI agents using the sequential crew component. Within this team, each member will get a specific task assigned via the sequential task component. 

Besides having their exact task in a team, one AI agent can perform several other tasks. Let’s take the content writer from the previous example. This agent’s main task is to write an article based on the SEO brief from the previous agent. In real life, a writer will have more tasks than just writing the article. For example, they may need to write a meta description, and even a social media post. Putting these as subtasks of one task can lead to a more chaotic and less clear output. 

Curious about the Flow we’re analyzing in this guide? It’s the Advanced Blog Generator and you can easily find it in your Flow library. 

The Difference Between Sequential and SelfManaged Tasks

You might have noticed there are two task components in your dashboard. The difference between these types is in the order of tasks and the level of control you get.

With a Sequential Task, the tasks are performed one after another in the exact order you specify. Once a task is done, it’s done and the Flow moves on to the next agent. The sequential approach is great for linear processes that don’t require task repetition.

But this isn’t always the case in the real world. Let’s take a real-life content writer. They will first do research and move on to writing, but as the article unfolds, they may realize more research is needed. Understandably, they will go back and forth between research and writing tasks before finally moving on to the next step. But this is impossible with sequential crews and tasks. That’s where Self-Managed tasks come in.

With Self-Managed Tasks, the manager AI agent decides the order of tasks. When making decisions, the AI tries to copy traditional organizational hierarchies closely and assign tasks to the best available agent. This opens up the possibility of repeating tasks and creating multiple iterations of the final output. 

Are you unsure about the exact order of tasks or does the process require task repetition? Try using Self-managed tasks instead of sequential ones. Learn more in this guide. 

How To Use Sequential Tasks

The sequential tasks are standalone tasks performed in the set order. You need to assign each task to a suitable agent. For each complex goal, there may be multiple agents and multiple tasks, all brought together by the Sequential Crew component. To use tasks, we first need to define the agents; only then can we assign tasks and create crews.

Setting up Sequential Tasks consists of three steps: 

1. Setting up individual AI agents
2. Setting up tasks for agents
3. Making the tasks and agents a Sequential Crew

Setting Up Individual AI Agents 

Each member of a real team has a role, goals, and a unique backstory that includes their past experiences, personality, and specific style. So does each AI Agent. 

For example, let’s focus on the content writer team member: 

• The Role is your agent’s job title. In this example, being a content writer is the role.  
• The Goal is what the agent does and what their ideal outcome is. The expected outcome for the content writer is a well-written article that adheres to the theme and SEO brief. 
• The Backstory represents who the agent is. Whether you like it or not, you always bring your personality, way of thinking, vocabulary, and past experiences to anything you do. This is even more visible in creative work, such as content writing. 

Go ahead and set up some agents. When creating a crew, always think of the end goal and which team members would you need to successfully achieve it. Then create agents that represent these team members. You can alternatively create just one agent if you wish to give the agent multiple tasks. 

Note: Do you have just one agent and one task? There’s no need to use task components. Simply use the goal field of the agent instead to give it the task. 

In our content writing example, we’ve created the SEO researcher, copywriter and proofreader agents. But the agents and tasks always depend on your specific needs and processes. Feel free to break down the existing process even more or add new agents. For example, you can add a designer agent that will generate images to go along with your article. 

Learn more about AI agents and how to use the AI Agent component 

Giving Agents Tasks

In Crews, each Agent is assigned a task to perform. Like in a real team, each member can carry out various project-specific tasks. The task components allow you to specify and assign these tasks. Continuing with our blog creation example, we now know who our agent is. The next step is to let the agent know their task and introduce them to the team. 

You’ll notice that, like with the Crew component, there are two possible task components— sequential and SelfManaged. Since these are two opposite approaches to managing agents, mixing them would make no sense. That’s why we’ll also use sequential tasks when using a sequential crew. 

Take the Sequential Task component and connect it to the agent performing the task. Below, you can see several agents, each connected to their task: 

In addition to the task, each agent in a Crew can also get appropriate tools, making their job easier and more accurate. In our example, the researcher uses the GoogleSearch and URL Retriever tools to control the research options. 

Notice how the tasks are linked. The task component contains the agent’s output. You must connect the tasks to ensure the next agent in line can access the previous agent’s output.

How To Set Up Sequential Tasks

Each task must have a description and an agent responsible for the execution. Optionally, you can fill out the expected output field if you need the output in a specific structure or want to make sure something is included. 

You already have the agents created and each one of them has a task connected. Now you need to describe the tasks and tweak the output. 

The task description for our content writer agent might go a little something like this: 

“Given the SEO content brief, write a blog post in no more than 1500 words. 

Never start paragraphs with vague statements such as "In the fast-changing field of...". Always go directly to the main information the paragraph should deliver. “

Let’s take a closer look at this task description:

“Given the content brief” – The agent knows what to do with the previous output.

“Write a blog post of up to 1500 words” = The output we expect from the agent.

“Never start…..” = Giving additional custom instructions to tweak the output. These instructions can be any pointers on language, vocabulary, structure or anything else that will help the agent create what you need.  

The expected output field is optional and works great when you need a clearly structured output or make sure something is included in the output. For example, our SEO researcher agent’s task is to: 

A brief in this form:

SEO friendly Title:

SEO friendly Meta description:

SEO friendly Outline

Ensuring it doesn’t forget to start the output with a title and meta description. 

Remember that sequential crews work with sequential tasks only, and SelfManaged crews work with SelfManaged tasks only.

Making The Agents A Crew 

Let’s go back to our Flow. It features three agents, each performing their specific task in a clearly defined order—a sequence. The last step of creating a crew is letting the agents know they’re a team. This is where the Sequential Crew component comes into play. 

The Sequential Crew Component 

The Sequential Crew component represents a group of agents that execute tasks in an exact order. It’s essentially a way to tell agents that they’re a team. There may be more than one independent team within your Flow, meaning more than one Sequential Crew component distinguishing these teams from each other. 

Want to learn more about sequential crews? Refer to our guide to learn everything you need to know. 

The Sequential Crew component is always at the end of the sequence. In our example, we only use one crew, but we still need to bring the agents together with the Sequential Crew: 

That’s it. Just send it to output, and now you have a team of agents working in an exact order. Our Flow includes three agents: an SEO specialist, a content writer, and an editor. 

The Flow used in this was the Advanced Blog Generator, which you can find in your Flow library.

Instead of vague output laden with telltale AI phrases, this Flow’s output will be well researched, inspired by top Google results, written according to a clear brief, and edited to avoid sounding like generic AI.  Plus, using a group of agents instead of a single agent minimizes bottlenecks. It ensures that any issues can be diagnosed and resolved promptly by simply tweaking one of the agents.