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App Builder is the AI-agent-powered custom app surface inside Vortex Apps. The merchant describes what they want their custom workflow to do in plain English. The agent plans the workflow, picks the right tools from every connected source, builds the app, deploys it to a sandbox, lets the merchant test it, and promotes it to production. The path from idea to running app is measured in minutes, not in weeks of developer time. App Builder subsumes the legacy Agent Hub that shipped in Vortex IQ V1. The Agent Hub model was a curated catalogue of pre-built per-platform recipes (Shopify image optimisation, BigCommerce SEO, Adobe pages SEO, Google Ads performance, and so on). Each recipe was a fixed agent template with fixed tools and fixed scenarios. Useful, but rigid. App Builder is the V2 evolution: instead of picking from a catalogue, the merchant describes what they need and the agent assembles a bespoke app for them. The legacy recipes still live inside App Builder as starter templates, but they are now examples of what is possible, not the only choices on offer.

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What App Builder is for

A merchant runs into a workflow that no off-the-shelf app covers. The most common patterns:
  • “Every Tuesday at 9am, summarise last week’s sales by SKU and post it to the #ops Slack channel.”
  • “When a customer places their third order, send them a personalised thank-you email with a discount code.”
  • “When checkout conversion drops more than 10% week over week, open a Jira ticket and assign it to the engineering lead.”
  • “Every morning, list the SKUs that are out of stock on Amazon but in stock on Shopify, and email the inventory manager.”
  • “If a Datadog alert fires on the storefront, post the incident to Microsoft Teams with the latest Vortex Mind report attached.”
These are not standard apps. They are merchant-specific stitches across data sources, schedules, and notification channels. App Builder is the surface where the merchant describes the stitch and the agent builds it.

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Who App Builder is for

  1. Operations leads who own the Tuesday morning summary, the weekly KPI digest, the inventory reconciliation report, and want them to run themselves.
  2. Merchandisers who need product-level alerts (low stock, declined order, return spike) routed to the right channel for their team.
  3. Finance teams who want daily revenue, refund, and chargeback summaries cross-referenced against the GL booking, delivered to email or Slack on a schedule.
  4. Customer service leads who want auto-generated tickets when a churn signal trips, when a payment fails, or when a customer crosses the at-risk threshold from a Vortex Mind report.
  5. Marketers who need to trigger campaigns or pause ad spend when a Vortex Mind report flags a stockout, a checkout regression, or a paid-traffic-waste finding.
  6. Founders and small ops teams who do not have a developer on payroll and need their custom workflows to run anyway.
If you have a workflow you currently run by hand once a week, you have a reason to use App Builder.

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How App Builder is different from V1 Agent Hub

The V1 Agent Hub shipped pre-built agents for specific platform tasks. The catalogue covered:
  • Shopify: AI Growth Advisor, Discount Creator, Image Agent, KPI Agent, Nerve Centre Agent, Pages SEO Agent, Product SEO Agent.
  • BigCommerce: Image Compression, Image Optimisation, KPI Agent, Product SEO Agent, SEO Pages Agent, StagingPro Migration Agent.
  • Adobe Commerce: Image Optimisation Agent, Pages SEO Agent, Product SEO Agent.
  • Cross-platform: Artifact Multimodal Agent, Ask Viq Agent, Brand DNA Agent, Campaign Manager (Dotdigital), Competitor Agent, Connector Agent, Email Sender (Dotdigital), Google Ads Performance, Google Analytics Insights, Page Speed and Web Vitals, Seasonal Events.
Each was a fixed agent. You picked the recipe, you ran it, and you got the result the recipe was built for. Customising required engineering. App Builder flips the model. The pre-built recipes still exist as starter templates inside the recipes library, but they are the floor, not the ceiling. The merchant can describe a brand-new workflow that has no template at all, and the agent will build it from scratch using the same tool primitives that power the legacy recipes. The architectural shift: from catalogue-of-recipes to agent-builds-the-recipe.

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The three-step model

Every App Builder workflow follows the same three-step shape.
  1. Describe. The merchant tells the agent what the app should do, in plain English. (“On Tuesday morning, summarise last week’s sales and post it to Slack.”) The agent parses the description, identifies the data sources required, the actions required, the schedule, and any conditional logic.
  2. Plan. The agent generates a structured plan: which tools it will use (read access to Shopify orders, write access to Slack), what schedule it will run on (every Tuesday at 9am), and what the output will look like. The merchant reviews the plan and either approves it, edits it, or asks for variations.
  3. Deploy. Once approved, the agent deploys the app to a sandbox first. The merchant runs a test execution, sees the actual output, and either promotes the app to production or sends it back for refinement. Production apps run on the agreed schedule and surface their runs in the deployment and monitoring view.
The flow is documented in detail on How it works.

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Pages in this section

PageWhat it covers
How it worksThe full agent workflow: prompt to plan to tools to sandbox to production. The architectural shift from V1 Agent Hub.
Building an appStep-by-step walkthrough of building an app from a single sentence, with a worked example (Tuesday morning Slack summary).
Tools and integrationsThe full toolkit available to App Builder agents: read access via Nerve Centre and Vortex Mind, write access via notification and ticket channels, Ask Viq Q&A as a tool.
Deployment and monitoringSandbox vs production, scheduling, run history, log inspection, error handling, rollback.
Recipes and FAQsThe pre-built recipe library (legacy V1 Agent Hub content as starter templates), plus App Builder FAQs.

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How App Builder connects to the rest of the AI OS

App Builder is the operational glue that turns the rest of the AI OS into automation.
  • Nerve Centre supplies every connected data source. App Builder agents read directly from the same data layer that powers the dashboard, so any KPI you can see on Nerve Centre is queryable by an App Builder agent.
  • Vortex Mind reports become triggers. When a Vortex Mind finding crosses a severity threshold, App Builder can react automatically (open a ticket, post an alert, pause a campaign, route to the right team).
  • Ask Viq is exposed to App Builder agents as a tool. The agent can ask Ask Viq plain-English questions on the merchant’s data and use the answer in its workflow (“ask Ask Viq for last week’s revenue, paste the number into the Slack message”).
  • Actions findings can be auto-routed by App Builder agents to the correct fix path: a SEO finding to a Jira ticket, a stockout finding to a procurement email, a checkout regression to an engineering channel.
  • Vortex Memory archives every App Builder run. The merchant can ask “show me every run of the Tuesday Slack summary in the last quarter” and Vortex Memory has it.

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Frequently asked questions

Is App Builder the same as the old Agent Hub? No. The old Agent Hub was a fixed catalogue of pre-built per-platform agents. App Builder is a generative surface where the merchant describes what they need and the agent builds it. The legacy Agent Hub recipes still live as starter templates inside the recipes library. Do I need to write code to use App Builder? No. The whole point of App Builder is plain-English description. If you can describe your workflow in a sentence, the agent can build it. Engineers who want code-level control can still drop in custom logic, but the default path is no-code. How is App Builder different from Zapier or Make? Zapier and Make are trigger-action workflow builders. You pick a trigger from a list, you pick an action from a list, you wire them together. App Builder is agent-driven: the agent decides which triggers and actions are required from your description, and assembles them. The agent also has access to read across every connected ecommerce source via Nerve Centre, run Vortex Mind reports, and ask Ask Viq questions, which Zapier and Make do not. How is App Builder different from a custom GPT or a ChatGPT agent? A custom GPT is a chat interface with a prompt and a small toolset. App Builder ships scheduled, monitored, production apps that run on the merchant’s behalf without a human in the loop, with full access to the merchant’s commerce data and write access to their notification and ticket systems. Can I edit an app after it is deployed? Yes. Every deployed app can be opened in the App Builder editor. You can change the prompt, regenerate the plan, swap tools, change the schedule, or pause the app. See Deployment and monitoring for the full lifecycle. Where do my App Builder apps run? On Vortex IQ’s managed infrastructure. Each app is deployed to its own sandboxed runtime with isolated credentials. You do not need to provision servers, manage Docker, or worry about uptime. See How it works for the deployment architecture.