Scheduled agent

An AI agent configured to run on a recurring schedule or in response to a trigger, performing work autonomously without a person starting each session.

Most people interact with AI through a chat window: ask a question, get a response. A scheduled agent flips the initiative. It runs at a set time or when an event fires, performs its task, writes the results somewhere durable, and stops. A morning briefing agent that compiles overnight email, calendar, and task updates before you wake up. A weekly report agent that pulls metrics and drafts a summary every Friday. A monitoring agent that checks production logs every hour and flags anomalies. The agent does not wait for a prompt; the schedule is the prompt.

Builder example

Scheduled agents are where AI automation becomes operational rather than conversational. They require durable context (the agent must know what it did last run), idempotent design (re-running the same schedule should not create duplicates), and clear output contracts (where results go and who reviews them). These constraints force better engineering than ad-hoc chat interactions.

Common confusion: A scheduled agent is still an agent, with all the reliability requirements that entails: error handling, escalation policies, and output validation. Putting an agent on a cron job without those guardrails creates a system that fails silently at 3 AM.