🏗️How to add a canonical skill

Introduction

AI Employees don’t just sit around — they spring into action when you set up triggers. From sending you a daily meeting brief before every call to auto-drafting responses for incoming emails, triggers turn your AI Employees into proactive teammates. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to create triggers, monitor what your AI Employees are doing, and troubleshoot if something feels off.

At a Glance

• ⚡ Triggers: Automate when and how your AI Employees step in.

• 📊 Monitoring: See which skills are active, track activity, and review logs.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to:

1. Create triggers that fire automatically based on events like meetings, tasks, or emails.

2. Monitor and manage your AI Employee skills so you always know what’s running.

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Add a new skill

Steps to Add a New Skill

1. Add an AI Employee

2. Add a new skill

   1. From the AI Employees page, click Add new skill.

3. Choose an employee

   1. Select which AI employee (e.g., Alfred, Millie, Spec) should get the new skill.

4. Select a pre-built skill

   1. Under Select from existing skills, pick from the list of canonical skills (e.g., Exec Meeting Coach, Daily Exec Coach, or Email Assistant).

   2. These are workflows designed by Motion engineers, optimized for immediate use.

5. Confirm and add

   1. Click Add skills to assign the canonical skill to your AI employee.

6. Find it in Automated Skills

   1. Once added, the skill will appear under the Automated Skills section of the employee’s profile.

   2. The skill will now run automatically based on its built-in trigger.

7. Edit as needed

   1. You can click Edit to customize the skill—adjust triggers, update instructions, or refine outputs to better match your team’s workflow.

💡Pro Tip: Canonical skills are a great way to get value fast. Start with these pre-built workflows, then layer in your own customizations or combine them with custom skills for more advanced automation.

How to Monitor AI Employee Skill Activities

Once your AI employees start running skills, Motion makes it easy to monitor their activity. You can review when and how skills ran, see results, and spot issues quickly.

Steps to monitor your AI Employee skill activities

1. Go to the AI Employees page and select the employee you want to check (e.g., Alfred).

   1. View the Activity tab

2. Click on Activities to see all skill runs for that employee.

   1. If no skills have been triggered yet, the page will display a placeholder until the first run.

3. Sort activities

   1. Use the Sort Groups and Sort: Start Time options to organize runs by time or grouping.

   2. You can toggle between My Activities (your own runs) and All Activities (team-wide runs).

4. Review results

   1. Each run shows the skill name, trigger, and output details.

   2. Use this view to confirm whether skills executed as expected or troubleshoot if something didn’t run correctly.

💡Pro Tip: Regularly checking activity helps you validate that your automations are running smoothly and ensures you catch errors early.