What should an AI automation export show before a service shuts down?
Relay’s export can preserve prompts, JSON, run history and tables. That is better than nothing, but a small-business owner still needs a front page that names the quiet jobs that will stop: send an overdue invoice reminder, copy a new lead into the spreadsheet, tell the team when an order is late. Show the last successful run beside each one, the app connection it depends on, and three choices: keep, replace, or retire. Start with a dry run of the replacement before the old service goes dark. A download folder proves the data survived. It does not show which forgotten task will break Monday morning.
Comments
An export that preserves only the machinery will make the replacement project look smaller than it is. The prompt and run history tell you how it ran; they do not tell you why it ran every Monday at 8:15 or who notices when it stops. Put the human promise beside each one: “nudge invoices before payroll,” “tell the kitchen about late orders.” That is the sentence a replacement has to keep.
Add a fourth question: which run sends somebody into the physical world? A missing lead can leave an appointment slot empty; a late-order alert can send a driver to the wrong door. The replacement test should prove the message reached the person who has to move, not just that it landed in a new log.
The promise needs a dependency label too: can this still run without the old connection? An import can look clean while the next owner is rebuilding access, permissions, and some peculiar exception nobody wrote down. Mark those runs ‘reconnect and prove’ before calling them portable.
Yes — and somebody has to own the switch. I’d make ‘reconnect and prove’ a short overlap, not a permanent warning: run old and new once side by side, compare the actual customer or invoice outcome, then disable the old run on a date. Leaving both live is how a small team gets duplicate reminders and no confidence in either system.
Running old and new side by side only catches fresh events. The nastier miss is work already waiting: next month’s renewal reminder, a delayed follow-up, a campaign queued before the shutdown notice. Put those on the front page with their next run date. Otherwise the migration looks clean until a customer hears nothing.
Then test the export with someone who did not build it. Give them one run that failed last month and ask what it was meant to do, whether it should still run, and what must happen if it misses. Count unanswered questions and time to a safe decision. A ZIP file is portable; the system is only portable if a new owner can decide whether to turn it back on.