Unify IT workflows at scale with the new automation orchestrator for Ansible Automation Platform

As automation practices mature, the workflows they need to support naturally grow more complex—there are more teams, trigger types, decision points, and AI recommendations to account for. Automation orchestrator is a composable workflow canvas for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform that enables teams to weave their existing job templates and automation libraries together with logic nodes, event-driven triggers, and AI agent recommendations into more complex IT operations workflows. Red Hat is now making the new automation orchestrator generally available as an add-on for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 2.7. 

For IT teams that have already put trusted, governed automation into practice with Ansible Automation Platform, this add-on  delivers a new set of tools for orchestrating automation at scale. Automation orchestrator simplifies complex workflow management in Ansible Automation Platform. The visual canvas (Figure 1) gives teams a clearer, more intuitive way to coordinate advanced orchestration without touching the proven automations already in production. 

Figure 1. An example CVE remediation workflow in the new automation orchestrator canvas experience  

What we’re adding to the Ansible Automation Platform experience

Proven playbook libraries, established governance models, and operational consistency form a trusted foundation for Ansible Automation Platform users. Automation orchestrator extends your Ansible Automation Platform environment with new orchestration capabilities built for modern, agentic IT operations. Key highlights include: 

• Unit reuse and composability. Every production-ready job template, role, and collection that a team relies on today becomes a reusable workflow node—immediately, and without modification. Teams can instantly assemble what they've already built into higher-level workflows that are easy to share, nest, and scale.
• Logic nodes for real-world workflow complexity. Automation orchestrator introduces a variety of new ways to infuse logic directly into workflows, including switch, conditional, loop, and converge nodes. Modern IT operations require orchestration that adapts to unpredictable, real-world conditions. By bringing built-in routing, branching, and iteration to the canvas, teams can easily adapt their established, deterministic automations to meet today’s multisystem, nonlinear workflow requirements.
• Event-driven and task-driven automation designed on a unified canvas. Event-driven automation, task-driven job templates, and workflow logic are now visible in the same place as drag-and-drop options on an intuitive workflow design canvas. Teams can quickly and efficiently design and deploy workflows that are triggered by webhooks, schedules, or event sources—with everything from the trigger, to the logic, to the execution, to the audit trail visible and governed in 1 management plane.
• Trusted orchestration of AI agent recommendations in IT operations. New task agent nodes allow teams to incorporate AI reasoning at specific decision points, while maintaining control in a governed environment. Agent recommendations flow directly into canvas workflows, but nothing executes without explicit guardrails—like human approval or Policy as Code. Plus, every AI decision and reasoning step is automatically recorded in the audit log. This is how IT teams can safely and seamlessly leverage AI: as a participant in governed automation, not as a separate system to manage alongside it.

Together, these capabilities enable what we call multimode automation—the ability to quickly and easily match the right execution type to each step of a workflow, all under a shared governance model. 

What stays exactly the same

Everything you’ve already built in Ansible Automation Platform stays exactly where it is. Your current playbooks, workflow templates, and scheduled jobs keep running through automation controller, with the same resilience, reliability, and controls your business demands—no migration and no disruption to what’s already working. 

Automation orchestrator simply gives you a canvas to handle more complex orchestration when you need it. Because it connects directly into your existing Ansible Automation Platform environment, any workflow you build in the orchestrator automatically inherits the role-based access control (RBAC) roles, approval gates, and audit trails you already have in place—and you won’t need to rebuild your governance model to get there. 

Automation orchestrator is where IT teams can build what comes next, with their existing Ansible Automation Platform environment as the proven foundation for where it all runs at scale.

Getting started

We are excited to see what our customers do with these new capabilities! Automation orchestrator is available as an add-on to existing Ansible Automation Platform subscriptions running version 2.7 or later. Contact your Red Hat account team to learn more and to schedule a demo. 

• Visit the automation orchestrator page to learn more. 
• You can also check out this overview video and explore this interactive demo.