Scheduled Tasks

Scheduled tasks are a key aspect of agent autonomy. Instead of waiting for you to send a message or for an external event to occur, your agent can wake itself up at specific times and take action proactively.

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Two types of scheduled tasks

Recurring tasks run on a regular schedule—daily, weekly, monthly, or any pattern you define.

• “Every Monday at 9am, generate a weekly sales summary and post it to Slack”
• “Every weekday at 7am, scan for AI news and send me a digest”
• “On the first of each month, compile expense reports and email them to finance”

One-off tasks run once at a specific time, then disappear.

• “Remind me to call the client at 3pm today”
• “Send the proposal to the investor tomorrow morning at 9am”
• “In 2 hours, check if the deployment succeeded and message me”
• “Post the product announcement to Slack at 5pm today”

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How it works

Think of it like your agent has an alarm clock. When you ask it to do something at a specific time, it sets an alarm for itself. When the alarm goes off, the agent wakes up and executes the task—just like it would wake up when receiving an email or other event.

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Recurring tasks

Recurring tasks are defined in the agent’s instructions. When you save the instructions, the agent automatically creates or updates scheduled tasks as needed. You can also ask the agent to schedule a recurring task via chat—it will update its instructions for you:

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One-off tasks

One-off tasks are scheduled through the chat. Since they only run once, they don’t appear in the instructions (which are meant to be persistent).

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Viewing and managing scheduled tasks

Go to Settings → Scheduled Tasks to see all scheduled tasks for an agent. From this tab you can:

• Enable or disable scheduled tasks — Disabling doesn’t remove the tasks, it just prevents them from running. Useful if you want to temporarily pause an agent’s autonomous work.
• See task details — View the schedule and description for each task.
• Run now — Trigger any recurring task immediately without waiting for its next scheduled run. Useful for testing or running a task on demand.

To edit or reschedule a recurring task, update the agent’s instructions or ask the agent in the chat. To remove a recurring task, simply remove it from the instructions—the scheduled task will be deleted automatically.

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Context when a task runs

When the agent wakes up for a scheduled task, it has access to:

• Its instructions and capabilities
• The task description (what you asked it to do)
• Any agent documents it has access to

This means you can structure complex tasks flexibly. For example, if your agent does a daily competitor analysis, you could:

1. Put brief instructions in the task: “Run the daily competitor analysis”
2. Keep detailed guidance in an agent document: list of competitors, what to look for, where to save the report

This keeps your instructions clean while giving the agent all the context it needs.

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Script-linked scheduled tasks

For deterministic, high-volume, or latency-sensitive work, you can link a scheduled task directly to a script instead of running the full agent pipeline. When a script is linked, the task fires the script directly—no LLM call, no plan, no security review—using the agent’s toolbox. This is much faster and cheaper than a regular agent run, and produces consistent, predictable output every time. Example use cases:

• A nightly task that queries your database, calculates KPIs, and emails a formatted report—all deterministic, no AI judgment needed
• A webhook-style trigger that ingests data from an external system and writes it to an agent database, routing only unusual cases to the full agent for reasoning

You can still invoke the agent from within a script for the parts that require intelligence—for example, a script that processes 500 items and only calls the agent for the handful that need a judgment call.

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Per-task model selection

Each scheduled task can use a different model than the agent’s default. This lets you optimize cost and capability per task—use a fast, cheap model for routine data processing and a more powerful model for tasks that require complex reasoning. Open the task’s settings to configure a model and thinking preference that applies only to that task. If no override is set, the task inherits the agent’s default model settings.

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Example use cases

With Email and Document capabilities:

• “Every Monday morning, summarize last week’s support tickets and email the report to the team leads”
• “At 6pm today, send me a reminder to prepare for tomorrow’s presentation”

With Slack and Research capabilities:

• “Every weekday at 8am, check for AI news and post a summary to #ai-updates”
• “In 1 hour, search for updates on the competitor’s product launch and message me”

With Google Drive and Analytics:

• “On the first of each month, generate a performance report and save it to the Reports folder”
• “Tomorrow at 9am, check if the Q4 data is ready and notify the finance team”

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FAQ

Can I schedule tasks in different time zones?

Yes. If you specify a time zone (e.g., “every day at 9am EST”), the agent will use that. Otherwise, it assumes your current time zone.

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