Triggers in InTouch AI are first-class objects — not polling loops bolted onto a scheduler. Watch a file for changes. Watch a directory for adds, deletes, and modifications. Or let the AI assistant evaluate arbitrary conditions on a cadence and fire when the business signal is right. Every trigger can run a full job or a single tool directly, with RBAC, alerts, and a full audit trail attached.
Triggers are usually an afterthought — a polling loop, a webhook node bolted on, a folder-watching shell script someone wrote on a Tuesday. Here's what changes when they become first-class objects with the same governance every other piece of automation gets.
Before: a script polls a folder every 60 seconds, sleeps through every fire window, races itself on file rotations.
After: file triggers fire on actual filesystem events with a configurable settle time, pass the file path forward as a job property, and inherit the same RBAC + audit as every other object.
Before: a folder-watching shell script on one server, a different one on another, a Lambda doing S3 events on a third. Different code, different failure modes, no central log.
After: one trigger object per watched location. Concurrent writes, rotation, symlinks, vanished files — all handled by the engine. One audit log for all of them.
Before: business signals (ticket sentiment, market moves, a trending topic) had no clean trigger path. You poll an API and write conditional code.
After: AI triggers evaluate a plain-English condition on a cadence and fire when the answer is yes. No event plumbing. No polling code. Just a sentence.
Most automation platforms treat triggers as an afterthought — a webhook node or a brittle file-check on a schedule. InTouch treats triggers the same way it treats schedules: as governed, auditable objects with owners, groups, rights, and alerts.
Point a trigger at an absolute file path. When the file's modification time changes, the trigger fires. Use it for arrival signals, export readiness flags, upstream system drops — any case where a known file is the source of truth.
Published to the job: triggerFile, triggerEvent, the changed timestamp.
Watch a directory. The trigger fires on any change in the folder — new files, deleted files, modified files. The job receives lists of what changed, so it can process only the new arrivals instead of scanning the whole directory on every run.
Published to the job: newFiles, deletedFiles, modifiedFiles, changedFiles, counts for each.
The AI assistant evaluates a condition you write in natural language — on a schedule — and fires when the answer is "yes." Great for fuzzy business signals: "alert me if yesterday's error rate is unusual," "run the report only if month-end close completed."
Evaluated by: any of 9 configured AI providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Mistral, Groq, DeepSeek, xAI, Hugging Face, or Ollama.
A file being written doesn't fire the trigger repeatedly. Configure settleTime — the trigger waits until the file's size and mtime have been stable for N seconds before firing. No double-runs, no partial-file reads. One of those details you only miss when it's absent.
Every trigger can execute a complete InTouch job (a DAG of tools with dependencies and outputs), or a single tool or skill directly with inline parameters. No "wrap one HTTP call in a workflow wrapper just to schedule it." Direct execution is first-class.
Link an alert to a trigger and it fires when the trigger fires — independent of the job it runs. Useful when you want "the file arrived" to notify a different team than "the job succeeded." Alerts go to any of the configured messaging channels.
Every trigger object has an owner, a group, and per-role rights. On Department and Enterprise editions, only users with update rights on the trigger group can change what path is being watched. The filesystem has permissions; your automation platform should too.
Job tools receive every detail of the triggering event — the changed file's full path, its new timestamp, lists of additions and deletions for folder triggers. Build logic that only processes what's new, or that branches on the event type.
The engine watches filesystem events itself — you don't maintain bespoke folder-watching shell scripts. You point at a path, set a settle time, and the engine handles every edge case (concurrent writes, rotation, symlinks, vanished files).
| Capability | InTouch AI | Apache Airflow | n8n | Shell scripts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Native file trigger | ✓ | Sensors + DAG hacks | Watcher node (limited) | You write it |
| Folder change events (add / del / mod) | ✓ | — | Partial | You write it |
| Settle delay for in-flight files | ✓ | — | — | You write it |
| AI-evaluated trigger conditions | ✓ | — | — | — |
| RBAC on trigger objects | ✓ (Dept/Enterprise) | — | Enterprise plan | — |
| Tailored alerts per trigger | ✓ across 8 channels | Via DAG failure hooks | Build a workflow | — |
| Run job OR single tool/skill | ✓ | DAG only | Workflow only | — |
Airflow has no native file trigger — you bolt on Sensors inside DAGs. n8n has a watcher but no enterprise RBAC over watched paths. external schedulers have no file awareness at all.
An SFTP drop lands a CSV. The folder trigger fires, publishes newFiles, the job picks up only the new ones, loads them into a staging table, archives, notifies finance. Settle delay ensures no partial reads.
An upstream system writes a readiness flag file when month-end close completes. The file trigger fires, the job runs reports, sends them out. No fixed schedule, no polling script.
An AI trigger runs every 15 minutes: "Does yesterday's transaction volume look unusual compared to the trailing 30 days?" Fires a job only when the AI says yes, sends a Slack summary to the on-call channel.
Folder trigger watches /dropbox/partner-x/. Each new file: validate schema, POST to the partner API, move to /processed/ or /rejected/ based on response. Full audit of every received file, every response.
A trigger can fire any of the 42+ tools — SQL across 11 databases, FTP/SFTP, SSH, HTTP, Docker, AWS (full CLI), Google Workspace, Essbase, TM1, JDE, or any of the 9 AI providers. A trigger can also invoke a skill by name: @weekly-report, @data-quality-check, @customer-escalation.
Download the free Personal edition and build your first file trigger in about ten minutes. No license key.