Definition
A self-healing workflow is an automated process that detects failures and recovers without human intervention. When a step fails, the workflow identifies the error, determines the cause, and either retries, reroutes, or applies a corrective action to keep the process running.
Example
An invoice processing agent fails to extract data from a poorly scanned PDF. Instead of stopping, it applies enhanced image processing, retries extraction, and if that fails, routes the invoice to a human reviewer with the specific fields that couldn't be read, then continues processing the rest of the batch.
Why it matters
Traditional automation breaks when something unexpected happens. Self-healing workflows keep running, reducing downtime and manual intervention.