Dash Bots Overview Growth+This feature requires the Growth+ plan or higher
Dash Bots are AI agents that run on their own, without you having to type a single message. While the AI Assistant answers when you ask it something, a bot works in the background - checking for overdue returns, writing your morning briefing, following up with customers, and more.
How Are Bots Different from the AI Assistant?
| AI Assistant | Dash Bots | |
|---|---|---|
| How it starts | You type a message | Runs automatically on a trigger |
| Interaction | Back-and-forth conversation | Runs independently, reports results |
| When it runs | When you ask | On a schedule, when an event happens, or when you click Run Now |
| Best for | Ad-hoc questions and one-off tasks | Recurring tasks you want to automate |
Think of the AI Assistant as a colleague you chat with, and Dash Bots as processes you set up once and let run on autopilot.
Key Concepts
What a bot is allowed to do
When you build a bot, you turn on what it may do using around ten plain switches - Look things up, Email & message customers, Payments & refunds, Change bookings, and so on. A bot can only do what you switched on.
If you want finer control, Fine-tune individual abilities opens the full list so you can pick exactly which abilities the bot has.
Money actions always ask you first. Refunds, charges, payment links, releasing a security deposit, and cancellations can never be set to run on their own - that is fixed and cannot be switched off.
See the full list of individual abilities
Triggers
A trigger determines when a bot runs:
- Manual - The bot only runs when you click Run Now. Useful for on-demand tasks.
- Scheduled - The bot runs automatically at a set time or interval (e.g., every morning at 9:00 AM, every Monday, every 4 hours).
- Event-based - The bot runs automatically when something specific happens in your account (e.g., a new booking is created, a payment is received, a survey response comes in).
- Weather - The bot runs when one of your weather rules is breached by the forecast.
Ask me first
For each thing a bot can do, you decide whether it acts on its own or checks with you:
- On its own - the bot gets on with it. Best for looking things up and low-risk changes.
- Ask me first - the bot pauses and waits for someone to approve or skip the action.
Anything that reaches a customer or moves money defaults to Ask me first, and money actions are locked that way permanently.
Everything waiting for you is collected in one Waiting for your OK box at the top of the Bots page - every bot, every pending action, Approve or Skip in one click. Skipping one action no longer cancels the run: the bot simply moves on with the rest of its work.
Skills - bots learn how you work
After real runs, Dash notices how your business handles things and suggests saving it as a skill - for example, how you deal with a cancellation caused by bad weather, or what to do on a second overdue reminder. Every suggestion is a plain-English card you either keep or turn down, and nothing is learned unless you keep it.
The Dash Skills page also holds two short notes about your business and how you like things done, which every bot reads before it starts.
Connected apps
Bots can also work with the other tools you use - your calendar, email, spreadsheets, accounting, and messaging apps. You connect an app once in Settings > Connected apps and tick exactly what it is allowed to do. Anything a bot sends out to a connected app always asks you first.
Learn more about connected apps
Instructions
Instructions tell the bot exactly what to do and how to behave. They are written in plain English - no coding required. For example, a late return bot might have instructions like: "Find all overdue rentals and send each customer a polite reminder email. Only contact customers who are 1 or more days overdue."
Templates
EquipDash includes ready-made bot templates for common tasks. Templates come pre-configured with a name, instructions, abilities, trigger, and approval settings. You can use a template as-is or adjust it to suit your business.
Asking for a bot in the chat
You do not have to open the builder at all. In the Dash AI chat you can simply say what you want - for example, "create a bot that emails customers the day before their booking" - and the bot arrives as a draft for you to review. Nothing runs until you look it over and turn it on.
What Can Bots Do?
Here are some examples of what you can automate with bots:
- Late Return Follow-up - Automatically find overdue rentals every morning and send reminder emails.
- Daily Booking Summary - Get a morning briefing with today's pickups, returns, experience sessions, and expected revenue.
- Waiver & Form Chaser - Remind customers to complete their waivers before their booking starts.
- Weekly Performance Report - Receive a weekly digest comparing revenue, bookings, and top products.
- Booking Preparation Guide - Send a personalized "what to expect" email every time a booking is created.
- Workshop Status Digest - Review workshop items daily and flag overdue repairs or items with upcoming bookings.
- Staff Roster Builder - Analyze next week's bookings and create staff shifts to ensure coverage.
- Customer Re-engagement - Identify customers who have not booked in 30+ days and suggest re-engagement strategies.
What Bots Remember
Bots keep track of what they already did, so the same customer will not get the same email twice in a day, even if two runs overlap or a run is repeated. If a bot tries to repeat outreach it has already sent, it skips it and carries on with the rest of the job.
Honest Results
A run tells you the truth about how it went, in plain sentences rather than a list of technical steps. Open a run and you can flip Show Dash's thinking to see the reasoning behind each step, or leave it off for the short version.
Runs never show a green tick for a job that did not finish. As well as Completed, you may see:
- Stopped early - the bot ran out of steps before finishing. The steps it did complete are all listed.
- Stopped - got stuck - the bot started repeating itself and was stopped. Nothing further was changed.
- Nothing needed doing this time - the bot checked, found nothing to act on, and stopped. This costs nothing.
Each run also shows roughly how much of your monthly AI allowance it used.
Plans and Limits
Bots are included with the Growth and Pro plans:
| Growth | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Bots you can have | 3 | 10 |
| Runs per month | 200 | 1,000 |
A run that finds nothing to do does not use any AI.
Credits
Bots consume AI credits from the same pool as the AI Assistant. A simple bot run that looks up a few bookings uses fewer credits than a complex run that processes many records and sends emails. You can monitor credit usage from Settings > AI Assistant.
Permissions
Only team members with the Bots: Manage permission can create, edit, enable, or delete bots, or approve and skip pending actions. Team members who can only view bots see the pages and the run history, but not the buttons.
Bots respect the same data scoping as the rest of EquipDash - they can only access data belonging to your business.