What is a Multi-Step Workflow?

Where a single-step automation might just send one notification when a trigger fires, a multi-step workflow chains together a series of actions, fetch data, transform it, make a decision, call an API, wait for a response, then act on the result, with the output of each step feeding the input of the next. Steps can be conditional (only run if a prior step meets a criterion), parallel (run several independent branches at once and merge results), or looped (repeat a step over a list of items). Building reliable multi-step workflows requires handling partial failure: if step four of seven fails, does the workflow retry just that step, roll back prior steps, or halt and alert a human? Well-designed systems checkpoint state after each step so a failure doesn't force the entire workflow to restart from scratch, and they log each step's inputs and outputs for debugging and auditability.