One real example of business process automation, walked all the way through

Because every other result for this keyword is a listicle. Kissflow, IBM, Workato, Tallyfy, and ProcessMaker each give you 10 to 15 named examples at one-paragraph depth, and none of them walks a single example to the level of the actual clicks and tool calls. The honest answer to 'what does business process automation look like?' is not a longer list. It is one loop, traced all the way through, so you can tell whether the thing is buildable for your shop. This page takes vendor bill triage because it is the most common weekly process in a small business and because it runs through four Mac apps that have no usable public API.

Three reasons. It runs weekly in almost every small business, so the payoff is obvious. It touches four apps with no honest API surface for this flow on macOS (Mail, Preview, a desktop accounting app, Finder), which forces the automation to use the accessibility tree instead of REST endpoints. And every step produces a verifiable artifact (a PDF, a ledger row, a filed document, a sent reply) so you can check the automation's work without trusting the model's self-report.

Apple's AXUIElement API exposes every onscreen element as a tree node with a role (AXButton, AXTextField, AXRow, AXCell, AXStaticText), a label, x/y coordinates, width, height, and visibility. Fazm drives the Mac through that tree instead of taking screenshots and asking a vision model where to click. Each traversal writes a structured text file to /tmp/macos-use/<timestamp>_<action>.txt where every line looks like [AXButton (button)] "Save" x:680 y:520 w:80 h:30 visible. You can verify it after any Fazm session: run rg -n AXButton /tmp/macos-use/*.txt and you will see dozens of matches. The tree is the contract between the model and the OS, and it is what makes this example reliable enough to actually run week after week.

Six `macos-use` primitives cover the whole loop: open_application_and_traverse (launch or focus an app and read its tree), click_and_traverse (click a tree element, optionally type text, optionally press a key, all in one call), type_and_traverse (type into the focused field), press_key_and_traverse (fire a key with optional modifiers), scroll_and_traverse (scroll by N lines at a coordinate), and refresh_traversal (re-read the tree without acting). Every step in the timeline on this page decomposes into a short sequence of these six calls. The primitive set is pinned in /Users/matthewdi/mcp-server-macos-use/llms.txt and the Mac client wires it up at /Users/matthewdi/fazm/acp-bridge/src/index.ts.

Those agents take a screenshot of the screen, pass the image to a vision model, and ask the model to point at pixel coordinates where it wants to click. That fails at three things this example needs. First, token cost: a full-resolution Retina screenshot is thousands of tokens per step, and this example is roughly 20 steps per bill. Second, brittleness: a 1-pixel UI shift, a theme change, or a different monitor scale invalidates a template match, but does not change the AXButton role and label. Third, scope: Claude Computer Use runs in a Docker container with a virtual display, so it cannot reach your real Mail or a real desktop accounting app; Operator is browser-only. Fazm runs locally, attaches to the accessibility tree of real Mac apps, and pays dozens of tokens per tree line instead of thousands per screenshot.

Zapier, Make, n8n, Workato, and Power Automate Cloud are iPaaS. They move data between apps that already expose REST or SOAP endpoints. In this example: Mail on Mac does not expose an iPaaS-friendly attachment API (IMAP does, but attachment handling in IMAP connectors is spotty and the categorization live in the Mail.app scripting surface, which iPaaS products do not speak). QuickBooks Desktop for Mac ships no public REST API, full stop; QuickBooks Online's API does not cover Desktop; there is no Zapier connector for it. Preview is not a cloud service. Finder tagging and filing is a macOS-only affair. The iPaaS tier works beautifully when it works, which is when every app in the chain is a cloud SaaS with a documented API. That is not this example.

Fazm ships 17 skill.md files inside the app bundle at Desktop/Sources/BundledSkills/: ai-browser-profile, canvas-design, deep-research, doc-coauthoring, docx, find-skills, frontend-design, google-workspace-setup, pdf, pptx, social-autoposter, social-autoposter-setup, telegram, travel-planner, video-edit, web-scraping, xlsx. Each is a prompt that gets loaded when the user's request matches its description. For the vendor bill example, three of them do most of the work: pdf (extract structured line items out of the attachment), xlsx (write ledger rows into the user's master tracker), and doc-coauthoring (draft the vendor reply). The skill files are plain Markdown, versioned with the app, and visible to you on disk, not hidden behind a vendor API.

The routing rule is explicit in Desktop/Sources/Chat/ChatPrompts.swift under the <tools> block. Paraphrased: desktop apps go to macos-use (tree); web pages inside Chrome go to Playwright (DOM); screenshots are taken only when the user literally asks 'what does this look like'. The rule says, verbatim, ALWAYS use capture_screenshot for screenshots (with modes screen or window). NEVER use browser_take_screenshot, that only sees the browser viewport, not the desktop. The effect is that a multi-step automation across Mail + Preview + Numbers + a desktop app costs tens of tokens per step, not thousands, because the model is reading structured text, not looking at pixels.

Two things. First, every tool call returns the refreshed tree after the action, so the model sees the new state before its next call. If a modal dialog appeared that the plan did not anticipate, the next response is the model handling that dialog (clicking Cancel, reading the error, adjusting). Second, InputGuard blocks the user's keyboard and mouse during an action so a stray click does not land in the middle of the automated sequence, and a 30-second watchdog prevents permanent lockout if the server ever crashes mid-step. Pressing Escape cancels immediately. All four are mechanisms of the mcp-server-macos-use binary and not something the prompt layer has to coordinate.

Yes. Install Fazm from fazm.ai, grant accessibility permission when asked, then ask it to run this exact example on your own bill inbox. After the run, open /tmp/macos-use/ in Finder. You will see a .txt file and a .png file per action. The .txt file is the accessibility tree snapshot at the moment of the action. Grep it: rg -n AXButton /tmp/macos-use/*.txt. The lines match the format shown in this guide exactly. You can also browse the bundled skills on disk at /Applications/Fazm.app/Contents/Resources/BundledSkills/ (path may vary by build), and the primitive contract is pinned at github.com/mediar-ai/mcp-server-macos-use in llms.txt.

The pattern generalizes to any weekly loop where the inputs land in one app, the processing happens in a second, the record-of-truth lives in a third, and the outbound message leaves from a fourth, and none of those apps expose a usable public API. Real examples of the same shape include: client onboarding across Contacts + Calendar + a CRM desktop app + Mail, tax-period prep across Preview + Numbers + a scanned-document folder in Finder + Mail, grant-tracking across a bank dashboard in Chrome + Numbers + a desktop CRM + Mail. The only thing that changes between them is which apps sit in which slot and which of the 17 bundled skills gets loaded. The six primitives stay the same.