What’s new in Novu: August 2026

August was a big month for the connection between notifications and conversations in Novu.

If we had to summarize the month in one sentence, it would be this: a notification no longer has to be the end of the interaction. You can send a message from a workflow, let the recipient reply, and continue from there with an agent that already understands why the message was sent.

We also expanded the Novu MCP server, added first-class adapters for Vercel AI SDK and LangChain, introduced a richer way to compose Chat steps, and added more control over provider-specific delivery.

Here is what we shipped in August.

Assign an agent to a workflow

If you are new to Novu, a workflow is the path an event takes from your application to your user. For example, an order-shipped event can carry order data, choose a channel, wait or digest when needed, and send the final message. Until now, that path usually ended after the message was delivered.

You can now assign an agent to a workflow in the Dashboard using Send & reply via agent. The workflow message is sent through that agent's connected channels. If the subscriber replies, Novu opens or continues a conversation with the originating workflow, sent message, and trigger payload already attached.

Consider a shipping update:

Your order has shipped. Track it here.

The customer replies:

Do I have an estimated date for arrival?

The agent receives the question with the original order context. Your application does not need to build a separate system to match the reply to the order, reload the trigger payload, and attach it to the conversation.

The workflow context follows the reply

Custom Code agents receive the originating notification through ctx.notification. Because one agent can handle conversations from different workflows, first narrow the notification to the expected workflow before reading its payload:

import { isFromWorkflow } from '@novu/framework';
import { orderShipped } from './workflows/order-shipped';

if (isFromWorkflow(ctx.notification, orderShipped)) {
  const { orderId, trackingNumber } = ctx.notification.payload;
}

The isFromWorkflow check connects the payload type to the selected workflow schema. It also prevents the handler from assuming that every conversation started from the same workflow. A conversation that began with an inbound message has no workflow notification context.

Managed Agents receive the same workflow and payload data automatically as conversation context. The Agent Conversations timeline also shows the notification that started the thread.

For digests, the latest message provides the default workflow context. If a user quotes a specific earlier message, Novu loads the context associated with that message instead.

Assigned workflows support the agent's connected Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage through Sendblue, and email channels. Web Chat is not included in this release. If the agent has no usable connection for a send, Novu falls back to the organization's configured provider and shows a warning on the step rather than silently dropping the delivery.

You can also override the assigned agent for an individual trigger, including sending a specific execution without agent reply routing.

Learn more about workflows and conversations.

Manage agents and inspect conversations through the Novu MCP server

The Novu MCP server originally focused on Novu Notify operations such as creating workflows, managing subscribers, triggering notifications, and debugging delivery. That made sense when the job ended with sending a message.

Now that workflows can start conversations, the same interface also needs to understand the agent and what happens after a recipient replies.

We added the following agent and conversation tools:

• Create and inspect agents with create_agent, get_agents, and get_agent.
• Update agent configuration with update_agent.
• Connect a channel to an existing agent with connect_agent.
• List conversations with get_conversations.
• Inspect a conversation timeline with get_conversation_activities.

Together with the existing workflow tools, these additions let an MCP-compatible AI tool help you create an agent, connect its channel, assign it to an existing workflow, and inspect the resulting conversations.

For example, you can ask Cursor, Claude Code, ChatGPT, VS Code, or another MCP-compatible tool to create a support agent and connect it to a channel. Later, you can ask it to retrieve recent conversations or inspect the activity behind a failed turn without moving between several Dashboard pages.

The agent tools use the agent identifier, not its database ID. Conversation tools are available on Novu Cloud and self-hosted Enterprise, and are not available in Community Edition.

Read the Novu MCP server documentation for setup instructions, supported clients, authentication options, and the complete tool list.

Bring a Vercel AI SDK agent to Novu Connect

Teams already building agents with the Vercel AI SDK can now connect those agents to Slack, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Telegram, and email through the @novu/framework/ai-sdk adapter.

Your model, prompts, tools, and business logic continue to run in your application. Novu Connect handles the communication path around that code. It receives messages from connected providers, loads the conversation history, passes the context to your handler, and delivers the response to the correct conversation.

The toModelMessages(ctx) helper maps Novu conversation history and any workflow-origin context into the format expected by the AI SDK. Tool loops also work in the conversation. When a tool uses needsApproval: true, Novu can present Approve and Deny actions in the channel, pause the turn, and continue after the user responds.

Run the command below from your project to get started:

npx novu connect --runtime ai-sdk

Read the Vercel AI SDK adapter changelog or follow the AI SDK quickstart.

Connect a LangChain or LangGraph agent

We also shipped a parallel adapter for teams using LangChain or LangGraph. The @novu/framework/langchain adapter connects your existing agent to the same Novu Connect channels and maps conversation history with toLangChainMessages.

There are two integration paths. You can return a configuration object from onMessage and let the adapter call createAgent().invoke() in your application, or invoke your existing agent or graph yourself and return its messages for delivery.

The distinction matters for approvals. On the adapter-managed configuration path, you can use needsApproval to show Approve and Deny actions in the conversation without adding a separate LangGraph checkpointer. If you invoke your own agent or graph, your application remains responsible for the approval loop.

Run the command below from your project to get started:

npx novu connect --runtime langchain

Read the LangChain adapter changelog or follow the LangChain quickstart.

Build richer workflow Chat messages

Workflow Chat steps are no longer limited to a plain-text field. The new Rich Chat editor lets you compose structured messages with text, images, dividers, lists, quotes, link buttons, variables, and content from Digest or Repeat steps.

You author one message in the Dashboard, then Novu translates the shared card into a provider-specific format at send time. Slack receives Block Kit, Microsoft Teams receives an Adaptive Card, and Telegram and WhatsApp receive formats suited to their platforms. Other Chat providers receive a compatible Markdown or text version.

The preview lets you switch between providers and see an approximate rendering before publishing. When a provider cannot represent a block or button fully, the editor shows a compatibility warning.

Existing workflows keep their current behavior. Legacy plain-text and Liquid Chat steps continue to use the Text editor, while new steps open in the Block editor. Framework users can return the same shared card model from step.chat().

Read how to write Chat templates in the Dashboard or see the Framework Chat step.

Learn more about rich chat editor.

Route workflow steps to on-call services and webhooks

Tool is now a first-class workflow channel alongside Email, SMS, Chat, and Push. Use a Tool step when a workflow needs to create an on-call alert or deliver data to an HTTP endpoint.

The first Tool providers are PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Grafana, and Tool Webhook. PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and Grafana can route each subscriber's notifications to that subscriber's own on-call service. This is useful when you build a product for teams that each bring their own operational tooling.

Tool Webhook covers destinations without a native Novu integration. In static mode, every delivery goes to one endpoint configured on the integration. In dynamic mode, each subscriber can register one or more endpoints with its own URL, headers, and HTTP method. A single trigger can fan out to every registered endpoint for that subscriber.

Webhook payloads can be signed with HMAC-SHA256 through the X-Novu-Signature header. Novu handles retries and records each attempt in Activity, so you do not need to build a separate delivery and observability layer for customer-defined endpoints.

Read the Tool steps changelog and the setup guides for PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Grafana, and Tool Webhook.

Save provider content overrides in the Dashboard

The Rich Chat editor gives you one shared message that Novu can render across providers. Sometimes you need the provider's own JSON instead, such as a complete Slack Block Kit message, a WhatsApp template, or PagerDuty incident fields.

Provider content overrides can now live on the Chat or Tool step in the Dashboard. Save the JSON once and it applies to every trigger. Because the override is part of the workflow, it is versioned and promoted from development to production with the rest of the workflow configuration.

Liquid variables work inside the JSON. The Dashboard also previews the merged payload, so you can inspect how default step content and provider-specific fields combine before you publish.

Slack and WhatsApp Business have schema-backed editors with autocomplete and validation. Other Chat providers use a free-form JSON escape hatch, so test those overrides with a real trigger and follow the provider's own API contract.

Saved and trigger-time overrides compose in a predictable order. A workflow-level trigger override takes precedence over the Dashboard value, and a step-level trigger override has the highest priority. Arrays replace the lower-priority array as a whole rather than merging item by item.

Provider content overrides are available for Tool steps and are rolling out gradually for Chat steps. Trigger-time overrides remain available if the provider selector has not appeared in your Chat step yet.

Read the provider content overrides overview and the provider override precedence rules.

Learn more about provider content overrides.

Improvements

We also shipped smaller changes that improve how workflows execute, how agent conversations reach users, and how teams operate Novu from the Dashboard. This is a curated list of the changes that have a direct effect on building or running your notification and conversation experience.

Workflow behavior and content

• Use topic data throughout a workflow. Topic custom data is now available through the Topics APIs, Liquid templates, step conditions, subscription conditions, and the workflow editor.
• Rely on HTTP step results. Response fields from an HTTP step are preserved when later conditions are evaluated. When Continue on failure is disabled, a failed HTTP step now stops the steps that follow it.
• Create and translate more workflow shapes. String conditions now support is empty and is not empty. Workflow payload schemas containing array enum items can be saved correctly, and translations work with long workflow identifiers.
• Send the intended Slack override. Slack text overrides now use the overridden text instead of falling back to the default Chat message.

Agent conversations and channel delivery

• More reliable workflow context on replies. WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage through Sendblue, email, and Microsoft Teams now resolve workflow-origin context more reliably from quoted replies and recently delivered messages. The operator timeline also shows which workflow started the conversation and who replied.
• Better human interaction flows. Managed Agent conversations in Slack now show each tool-approval card when several approvals occur in sequence. Framework helpers now include ctx.ask, ctx.approve, ctx.choose, and ctx.tell for interactions inside the agent's conversation.
• Email replies can arrive through CC or BCC. Inbound agent email routing now works when the registered address appears in either field, and matched BCC recipients are included in the normalized message data.

Dashboard and platform reliability

• Cleaner subscriber credential management. Empty integration cards are hidden until you choose to add credentials, nested credential drawers scroll correctly, and saved values no longer flicker back to an earlier state.
• More accurate workflow and Activity states. Workflow badges no longer remain on Action required after validation errors are resolved, and Activity can load nested step-filter groups without crashing.
• Safer data handling. Deleting a subscriber now removes connected channel endpoints, and secret environment variables are masked during preview and delivery rendering.
• More dependable trigger processing. Queue and idempotency fixes reduce duplicate jobs, prevent trigger requests from acknowledging work before it is durably queued, and preserve the original client error when an idempotent trigger is replayed.

That is August

Taken together, these releases make the path clearer in both directions. A workflow can start a conversation, and an agent can trigger a workflow. Both use the same subscribers, channels, and delivery infrastructure.

You also have more choice in how you build the agent, compose the message, and reach the final destination.

Open the Novu Dashboard to try the August updates, and tell us what you build or what you want us to improve next.