AI Helper is the fastest way to create a flow in JAMS Incident Management. You describe what you want to monitor in plain English; JAMS Incident Management drafts the flow and asks you to confirm any missing details before saving.
It's especially useful when you're not sure which trigger type or settings to pick — the AI handles the structural decisions.
Two modes. The AI Helper page has a toggle at the top:
- Build a flow — draft a flow from a description (the rest of this article).
- Ask a question — ask about JAMS Incident Management and get answers grounded in this Help Center. See Ask a question below.
Plan availability: AI Helper is included on the Professional plan and up. See Plans & Billing.
Before you use it
AI Helper needs an AI provider API key configured for your tenant — either OpenAI or Anthropic. Without one, the page falls back to "heuristic mode" — basic pattern matching that catches the common cases but isn't anywhere near as good.
Set the key once at Dashboard → User menu → AI Provider Key. It's a tenant-wide setting, not per-user. Costs a few cents per flow drafted — typically under $1/month for most teams.
You don't pick a provider — the key does. Paste an OpenAI key (
sk-...) or an Anthropic key (sk-ant-...) and JAMS Incident Management works out which vendor it belongs to and tells you what it detected before you save. Switching vendors later is just pasting the other key; there is no setting to change and nothing to restart. One key per tenant — saving a new one replaces the old.
Why isn't this just "use JAMS Incident Management's key"? Each tenant pays for their own AI usage so we don't have to charge a flat monthly markup and we don't see your prompts. The key is encrypted at rest before storage.
Opening AI Helper
Click AI Helper in the sidebar (or hit the "+ New flow" button on the Flows page and pick AI Helper).
You'll see a chat-style interface. The first message asks you to describe your alert in plain English.
Prompts that work well
The more specific you are, the less back-and-forth you'll have. Two examples that work cleanly:
Email-triggered alert:
Alert me by SMS and call when an email arrives in
monitoring@mycompany.comwith "CRITICAL" in the subject. Send to the on-call group. Escalate after 2 minutes.
JAMS job failure:
When a JAMS job called "Nightly ETL" fails, call my phone and SMS the data team. If no one acknowledges in 3 minutes, also email the team lead.
JAMS Incident Management parses the prompt into a draft flow — trigger, recipients, channels, escalation — and shows you what it built. If anything is missing (an email connection you haven't created yet, a Team Group that doesn't exist), it'll ask for it inline.
Prompts that won't work yet
AI Helper can't yet do things JAMS Incident Management doesn't support natively. Some examples:
- Conditional logic across flows — "if A fails AND B is offline, alert; else just log." Each flow is independent.
- Time-based scheduling of the alert itself — "every day at 2am, send a status SMS." Flows react to triggers, not the clock. Use a cron job that calls your webhook for this.
- AI summarization of payload — "include a 1-sentence summary of the error in the SMS." The message body comes from the trigger payload as-is.
After the draft is created
AI Helper takes you to a review screen showing the flow it built. Before saving:
- Verify recipients — most common edit point. AI Helper picks reasonable defaults but might not know your team structure.
- Verify escalation timing — defaults to 5 minutes; tighten to 1–2 minutes for production-critical alerts.
- Check the trigger details — for webhook flows, JAMS Incident Management shows the URL + API key after save. For email flows, confirm the right mailbox is selected.
Save → the flow is live. Test it (see Getting Started step 5).
Editing flows AI Helper created
Once saved, flows from AI Helper are no different from manually-built flows. Edit them at Flows → click flow name → Edit. The AI doesn't "own" them — they're regular flows.
If you want to recreate something similar with a tweak, easiest path is copy a working flow from the Flows list (Actions menu) and edit the copy.
When AI Helper says "Heuristic mode active"
That's the fallback — your AI provider couldn't be used. See troubleshooting for the fix (usually means the key isn't set, isn't valid, or hit a rate limit).
The heuristic mode catches the most common patterns (webhook + SMS, email + call), but anything beyond that needs a real LLM. Set the key and try again.
Ask a question (Help Center Q&A)
The Ask a question toggle on the AI Helper page turns it into a documentation assistant. Ask something like "How do I set up the JAMS connector?" or "Which recipients can escalate?" and it answers from this Help Center, linking the articles it drew from so you can read the full detail.
- Answers are grounded in the Help Center — it won't invent features that don't exist, and it cites the docs it used.
- It uses the same tenant AI provider key as Build mode. Without a key, Ask mode returns a short pointer to the Help Center instead of an AI answer.
- Ask mode is read-only — it doesn't create or change anything. Switch back to Build a flow when you want to make something.
Tips
- Be specific about channels. "Notify me" defaults to SMS. If you want a phone call, say so explicitly.
- Name recipients by group, not individual emails. "On-call team" or "data team" works if you have those Team Groups; raw emails work too but are less reusable.
- Set up prerequisites first. If your flow needs an email connection or a Team Group, create those at Connections and Team Groups before running AI Helper. Otherwise it'll keep asking inline.