# What is Flow?

> Flow: an AI-native orchestration surface for building and deploying automations across APIs, AI agents, and enterprise services on the UiPath Maestro runtime.

Flow is an AI-native orchestration surface for building, evaluating, and deploying automations that connect APIs, AI agents, and enterprise services. You design processes by placing nodes on a canvas and connecting them. You can then debug your process to verify that it works as expected, evaluate it against realistic data sets, and deploy it to your organization.

Under the hood, Flow runs on the UiPath Maestro runtime. This gives you the simplicity of a drag-and-drop editor with the reliability of an enterprise orchestration engine.

You build processes with Flow in Studio Web or in [VS Code](vs-code.md), publish and deploy them from Orchestrator, and monitor and manage them from Maestro Instance Management.

## What you can build

- **API integrations**: call any Representational State Transfer (REST) endpoint, transform the response, and route it downstream
- **AI agent orchestration**: trigger UiPath agents, wait for results, and branch on their output
- **Human approval workflows**: pause a process until a person reviews and approves
- **Document processing**: extract structured data from documents with IXP models and route it downstream
- **Scheduled automations**: run processes on a recurring schedule without manual intervention
- **Data pipelines**: extract, filter, transform, and load data across systems

## How Flow fits into UiPath

Flow is one way to build automations on the UiPath platform. It's designed for developers and technical users who want a visual, code-optional experience for process orchestration.

Flow processes run as **agentic processes** in Orchestrator, alongside RPA workflows, API workflows, and AI agents.

If you've used Maestro Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) before, Flow is a different product built on the same runtime. Refer to [Choosing a Maestro modeler](choosing-a-maestro-modeler.md) for a detailed comparison.

## Get started

- **[Your first Flow](quickstart.md)**: build a working process in under 5 minutes
- **[Flow in VS Code](vs-code.md)**: set up and use Flow in the VS Code extension
- **[Choosing a Maestro modeler](choosing-a-maestro-modeler.md)**: understand which tool fits your use case
- **[Orchestrate an AI agent](orchestrate-an-ai-agent.md)**: connect Flow to UiPath's agentic capabilities