Work through practical exercises for API integration, workflow automation, knowledge AI, document processing, SaaS foundations and cloud operations.
Illustrative technical learning workshop
A concrete exercise. A useful next step.
Choose a workflow you recognise, complete the exercises and use the linked guides to review your decisions. Each path produces a planning artifact to discuss with your team. These exercises use your own systems and approved examples; access to a released APPNEURAL API or SDK is not required.
6 learning paths
Beginner
Plan an API integration
Follow one business record from its source to the destination. Make the interface and its failure conditions explicit before writing the connector.
Before you begin
A source and destination system
Basic HTTP knowledge
STEP 1
Define the record and boundary
Choose one operation, such as creating an approved customer record. Name the authoritative system and draw the information that may cross its boundary. Mark the account or permission needed for each action.
Write the required fields, validation rules and expected acknowledgement. Add examples for missing data, an expired credential and a slow destination. Decide how an operator will locate the same operation in both systems.
Describe what should happen if the destination saves a record but the response is lost. Specify a stable operation reference, duplicate handling and reconciliation. Review the draft with the person who owns the destination data.
Your planning artifact: A draft contract, field mapping and failure-test checklist.
Beginner
Design a recoverable workflow
Turn a repeatable task into clear states and responsibilities. Keep the exception path as understandable as the successful path.
Before you begin
A repeatable business task
A named process owner
STEP 1
Separate rules from judgment
List the decisions in the current process. Mark which have an explicit rule and which require a person to interpret context. Compare a conventional automation with an AI-assisted option before choosing either.
Draw pending, approved, processing, completed and failed states for one operation. Identify who may change each state and which transition needs approval. Include cancellation and a repeated event in the sketch.
Describe how a failed operation appears to its owner. Define safe retry, correction and escalation actions, and the evidence needed to declare completion. Check that failure of a notification cannot hide the saved business state.
Your planning artifact: A workflow sketch with permissions, exception handling and acceptance cases.
Intermediate
Scope a knowledge assistant
Build an evaluation plan around approved documents and real employee questions. Start with retrieval and access rather than a polished chat demonstration.
Before you begin
An approved document collection
Content and access owners
STEP 1
Select dependable sources
Choose one team and a small collection of current documents. Record ownership, revision context and who can read each source. Write down unanswered or contradictory questions that need a content decision first.
Draw the journey from a signed-in question to retrieval, a cited answer and the original document. Add cases for denied access, a deleted document and insufficient evidence. Decide what the interface should say when no reliable answer exists.
Create representative questions with reviewed answers and supporting passages. Include ambiguous and out-of-scope requests. Agree how correctness, citation relevance and permission enforcement will be evaluated before the pilot is expanded.
Your planning artifact: A permission-aware pilot scope and a reviewed question set.
Intermediate
Design document extraction with review
Follow a document from approved upload to a validated record. Keep uncertain fields visible to the person responsible for the downstream decision.
Before you begin
Representative approved sample documents
A field and record owner
STEP 1
Define the expected fields
List the important fields, accepted formats and required precision. Gather several document layouts and examples with missing or conflicting values. Mark fields whose errors would affect money, identity or an operational decision.
Sketch ingestion, extraction, validation and review as distinct steps. Show how a reviewer opens the original evidence and corrects a candidate value. Define which failures block a downstream write.
Specify how an approved document maps to one destination record. Include a repeated upload, a rejected field and a lost integration response. Agree how to reconcile saved state and protect the document during retention and deletion.
Your planning artifact: A field-validation plan and a human-review workflow.
Intermediate
Map SaaS boundaries and ownership
Choose one customer journey and model the account, permission and operating boundaries needed to support it.
Before you begin
A target customer journey
Basic application and data modelling
STEP 1
Compare the delivery options
Write the workflow requirements, existing products that could meet them and the gaps that matter. Compare configuration, integration and custom development, including the people who would maintain each option over time.
Draw membership, invitations, roles and removal for two organisations. List reads, writes, exports and background jobs that must remain tenant-scoped. Include a user who belongs to both accounts and someone whose access is removed.
Document service boundaries, authoritative data, dependencies and recovery assumptions. Compare a modular application with separate services against the team's capacity to deploy and operate them. Write a review trigger for the chosen design.
Your planning artifact: A tenant-boundary sketch and a build-or-subscribe decision record.
Advanced
Prepare a cloud release review
Evaluate a complete user journey, its dependencies and recovery options before declaring an environment ready.
Before you begin
A working application or proposed architecture
Named deployment and dependency owners
STEP 1
Define the workload and constraints
List request duration, background work, expected volume and data requirements. Compare suitable hosting models with the actual provider limits. Include cost ownership, credentials and dependency access in the review.
Choose one important user task and follow every dependency. Describe the effect of a timeout, unavailable database or repeated event. Identify what readiness, logs and metrics must reveal without exposing private information.
Write the deployment, rollback and data-compatibility steps. Define how the team will verify a successful journey after release, respond to a failed check and rehearse recovery. Assign each action to an owner before the release review.
