Core Concepts

This section covers the foundational concepts of the Ema Builder Platform. Understanding these concepts is essential before building or customizing AI Employees.

Platform Fundamentals

• AI Employees -- What AI Employees are, their lifecycle, interface types, and how they differ from traditional automation.
• AI Employee Groups -- Organizing AI Employees into groups for easier navigation and management.
• Workspaces and Tenants -- Multi-tenant architecture, workspace isolation, partner-customer hierarchy, and tenant management models.
• Projects -- Project-based workflows for campaign, recruitment, document generation, and other multi-step processes.
• Frontier Apps -- Deploying custom web applications that connect to AI Employees via the Ema platform.

Generative Workflow Engine (GWE)

• GWE Overview -- What the Generative Workflow Engine is, the visual canvas, code view, and how workflows execute as DAGs.
• Workflows and Actions -- Workflow structure, action types, the DAG execution model, and how actions compose.
• Named Inputs and Outputs -- The preferred data-passing protocol for flexible, multi-output workflows.
• Conditionals -- Boolean trigger-when expressions, skip propagation, optional agents, and branching patterns.
• Type System: Well-known types, array types, and enumerations.
• Workflow Validation -- Static validation, path enumeration, and ensuring all paths produce required outputs.
• Workflow Version History -- Tracking changes to workflow definitions over time and reverting to previous versions.

For internal implementation details (Temporal orchestration, gRPC contracts, data models, and protocol internals), see the internal core concepts supplement.