Scheduling AI agents: what should run on its own

Some agents should wait to be asked: a research assistant, a writing helper, anything that starts from a person's question. Most agents doing ongoing work should just show up: sort the inbox before the day starts, write the Monday report, summarise the night's alerts. Putting those on a schedule is what turns an agent from a tool into a colleague.

What belongs on a schedule

A job is a good fit for a schedule when:

• It recurs. The same work, on the same inputs, every day or every week.
• Nobody should have to remember it. The value is that it happens without a reminder.
• The output has a natural time. A brief before a meeting, a summary before the on-call shift, a report on Monday morning.

A job is a poor fit when it depends on a specific request, or when running it with nothing to do still costs money. Run those on demand or from your own code instead.

Pick the cadence from the work

• Daily, early: anything someone reads at the start of the day, like an on-call summary, an inbox sort or a queue of drafts to review.
• Weekly: reports and reviews, where a day's data is too noisy to act on.
• In the right time zone: a "9 a.m." run should mean 9 a.m. where the team is.

Know when a scheduled agent goes quiet

The failure unique to scheduled agents is silence. A run that never starts raises no error, so nothing tells you it didn't happen. Two habits catch it:

• An alert on no activity: notify when an agent that should have run hasn't, within a window you choose.
• A last-run status per schedule: the schedule list shows when each agent last ran and whether that run succeeded, so a failing weekly job doesn't wait a week to be noticed.

Pause without deleting

Agents need breaks: a source is down, the team is on holiday, a prompt is being rewritten. Pause the schedule rather than the agent, so it can still be run by hand and its history stays intact.

Scheduling in AgentOS

• On an agent's Schedule tab, choose Daily, or Weekly and a day, then the time and the time zone.
• Add optional run instructions: a JSON input passed to every scheduled run.
• The Schedules page lists every schedule with its next run, last run and status, and a switch to pause it.
• Pair it with an Agent has no activity alert. The scheduling docs cover the details.