What MyFitnessPal is building with AI in Tines

Written by Celina MurphyContent Manager

Published on June 4, 2024

With an advanced security automation program that protects over 200 million users worldwide, the team at MyFitnessPal is a constant source of inspiration to us at Tines. 

They’re the kind of team that makes Tines better by asking tough, thought-provoking questions, and are incredibly generous in sharing what they’ve learned. We got a chance to celebrate this in 2023 when their patch management workflow was crowned the winner of our You Did What with Tines? competition

When they agreed to take part in the Early Access Program for AI in Tines, we were immediately excited to see what they built.

Along with a small group of Tines customers, they were given a few weeks to use the new AI features – automatic mode and the AI action – ahead of their general release. 

An extremely short learning curve meant it took Staff Engineer Tyler Talaga just a couple of days to build AI-powered workflows that helped his team work faster.

As far as barrier to entry goes, there really isn’t any. Getting started with it is so easy.

Tyler Talaga, Staff Engineer at MyFitnessPal

So far, Tyler has used the AI action to generate interactive content blocks for Slackbots, and audit and improve existing Tines workflows. He expects to see significant time savings from a workflow that allows the IT team to interactively generate and submit XML payloads to the Jamf Pro API for creating profiles and policies.

“You usually have to pull down an existing profile or policy from a template,” Tyler says, “but because we’re able to generate XML dynamically, we can expose that to a couple of our ITSec members, and say, ‘If you need to generate X, go ahead and run it through the AI action.’ That’s going to save a tremendous amount of time.”

Interactive contentfor Slack blocks
Auditing and improvingexisting workflows
Change controlrequest summarization
Dynamic XML generation

They’re also using AI to summarize change control requests. Tyler explains; “With change control enabled on most of our stories, we can end up with a lot of change requests. So, we run the story diffs through an AI action, which analyzes them - tell me what changed, and who changed it, and what happened here. 

It’s a lot easier for the AI to look across all that JSON, as opposed to a human reviewing every detail for every request. That’s been excellent and generally saves our team members a lot of time.

Tyler Talaga, Staff Engineer at MyFitnessPal

MyFitnessPal's workflow

Summarize suggested changes in Tines stories with AI

Use AI to summarize changes being proposed in a Tines story and present to reviewers in a Slack channel. Provide links to the story so that changes can be approved quickly. Close the loop with the requester once approved.

Tools

Slack

Community authors

Tyler Talaga and Caleb Williams at MyFitnessPal

Tyler adds that he’s already started “offloading” tasks onto the AI features Tines. “Every month, I check the overall structure of our stories manually. Now, AI completes some of those manual checks and updates for me, including checking descriptions and tags, and change control enforcement. It checks published stories, for example, to see if any are lacking description, updates them as needed, and then goes on its merry way.” 

And Tyler and his team are just getting started. Next, they plan to use AI in Tines to generate Slack blocks for workflows that require team interaction via Slack. “What’s fantastic about the AI is that we can say, ‘OK, based on this upstream input, go ahead and generate a series of Slack blocks, these are the general guidelines I want you to adhere to, this should be the header, it should have two buttons, the action ID should adhere to this format, etc.’”

“It’s a pain in the butt to do that every single time because there are easily eight or more Slack blocks with heavy interactive payloads, and the more interactivity you have in a Slack DM, the more arduous it is. The AI action has been fantastic for that.” 

Tyler’s thoughts on the new features are echoed by MyFitnessPal’s Senior Director, Security and IT, Allen Cox. 

It's unlocking new use cases for us. Automatic mode, especially, promises to help the team work faster and lower the barrier to entry for non-developers on the team.

Allen Cox, Senior Director, Security and IT at MyFitnessPal

Learn more about powering your workflows with AI at tines.com/ai