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Demo: Automation Orchestrator

Start here. A customer watches an Automation Orchestrator workflow chain existing AAP job templates with logic nodes and human approval — a visual canvas over the AAP they already have — in about twenty minutes.
Length 20 minutes (15 + 5 for questions)
Audience Platform engineers and automation leads evaluating workflow orchestration beyond what AAP provides natively
Reader The Ansible pre-sales engineer presenting it
Needs a live environment? Yes — the workflow canvas and AAP integration are live
Status Draft — guide written, run-sheet timings pending rehearsal

Start here before rehearsing. These are the confirmed, publicly available resources as of 2026-09-11.

Link What it is
Product page Sold as an add-on to an AAP subscription
Product documentation AO is its own docs product, not a section of AAP docs
What is AO Overview and positioning
Create your first workflow Getting started guide
AAP-integrated topology The topology we run
Install OLM, AutomationOrchestrator CR, PostgreSQL must be provisioned in advance
Add AAP to workflows Wiring AAP job templates into AO workflows
Approvals and human oversight Approval nodes and gating
Authentication (SSO/OIDC) How SSO is configured
REST API guide Service accounts, OpenAPI 3.1
Node type catalog Every node type AO supports
Release notes Version history
GA blog Justin Braun, 2026-08-21; GA add-on for AAP 2.7 or later
Interactive demo CVE remediation: EDA trigger, AI analysis, approval
Overview video Product overview
Red Hat Summit press release 2026-05-12 — said "technology preview"; the August GA superseded it
Community announcement 2026-08-24, Ansible Forum
AAP 2.7 documentation hub The platform AO extends

Instance API docs

Every AO instance serves its own interactive API reference. The host changes with every RHDP environment — substitute the Route from the automation-orchestrator namespace.

Endpoint Format
https://<ao-host>/api_docs/v1/docs Swagger UI
https://<ao-host>/api_docs/v1/redoc ReDoc
https://<ao-host>/api_docs/v1/openapi.json OpenAPI 3.1 spec

The four documents

File Read it when
run-sheet.md While presenting. Minute markers, what is on screen, exact commands, recovery moves
talk-track.md While rehearsing. The narrative and the actual words, beat by beat
architecture.md When asked "how does that work". The install flow, the integration, the MCP server
objections.md Before you go in. What this audience asks, answered from the code

Present from the run sheet. Rehearse from the talk track. The other two are reference.

The 60-second version

  1. Log in to AO through AAP SSO — one click, same credentials. AO redirects to the AAP gateway; once authenticated, you land on the AO dashboard.
  2. Build a workflow on the visual canvas — drag AAP job templates from the integration, add a conditional node and an approval node.
  3. Run it — AAP executes the jobs, AO orchestrates the sequence and gates the approval. The audience watches nodes light up on the canvas as each step completes.

What the demo is actually about is not that AO exists. It is that AO is a canvas over the AAP you already have. Your job templates, your credentials, your RBAC. The orchestration layer adds logic and human oversight without replacing anything.

Why it does not work without a cluster

The compelling beats are a live canvas and a running workflow. There is no renderer for the AO UI — the workflow builder, the execution timeline, and the approval gate are all interactive and cannot be captured as static artifacts the way the OpenShift Virtualization demo page can.

Screenshots from a previous run can carry a shortened version of the story, but the drop in persuasion is steep: the whole argument is "look at the thing working", and a screenshot of something working is the weakest form of that claim.

If you want to run it live

Two things, in order:

/sales-demos-orchestrator         # install AO + its CloudNativePG database
/sales-demos-orchestrator-config  # connect AO to AAP: OIDC SSO + integration

Or launch the AAP workflow AAP Ecosystem - Deploy Automation Orchestrator, which chains both.

Then log in to AO through AAP SSO and build the demo workflow on the canvas.

New to this repo? Run /sales-demos-first-time first.