Vuex actions handle asynchronous operations and complex business logic before committing mutations to change application state in Vue applications. With over 25 years of experience building complex applications and as the creator of CoreUI, I use Vuex actions extensively for API calls and async operations. The most effective approach is defining actions as functions that receive a context object with commit, dispatch, and state properties. This provides a clean separation between async operations and state mutations while maintaining predictable data flow.