Integration
Webhook
A webhook is an HTTP callback that a service sends to a URL of your choosing when a specific event occurs — a payment completes, a form is submitted, a ticket is updated. Webhooks are the standard mechanism for triggering AI automation pipelines from external platforms without polling.
Unlike REST API polling (where your system asks 'anything new?' on a schedule), webhooks push data immediately when an event happens, enabling near-real-time automation. Webhook security requires signature verification (HMAC) on every incoming payload to prevent spoofing. In AI agent architectures, webhooks are the entry point that hands off external events to the agent's processing loop.
Related terms
- Event-Driven Automation — Event-driven automation is an architecture in which business processes are triggered by real-time events — a form submitted, a payment received, a threshold crossed, a message received — rather than by scheduled batch jobs or manual initiation.
- API Gateway (AI) — An AI API gateway is a proxy layer that sits between internal applications and external AI model APIs, enforcing rate limits, cost controls, authentication, PII redaction, audit logging, and fallback routing across multiple model providers.
- Workflow Automation — Workflow automation is the replacement of repetitive multi-step business processes with software that executes them deterministically, with optional human checkpoints at decision points.