Scheduled Agent
Also called: Cron agent
A scheduled agent is an agent configured to run automatically on a recurring time-based schedule — daily, hourly, every Monday — rather than being started by a person or an external event.
Some agent work genuinely needs a human or an event to kick it off; other work just needs to happen regularly, whether or not anyone's watching — a daily summary of overnight activity, a weekly report, a periodic check that something is still healthy. A scheduled agent is built for that second case: its trigger is purely time-based, typically a cron-style schedule, rather than a webhook or a manual command.
Under the hood this is usually the plainest possible combination of pieces already covered on this page: a cron schedule as the trigger, which starts an agent run at each scheduled time, producing some result — a report, an update, a notification — and then exiting until the next scheduled time.
Scheduled agents don't need to run on dedicated always-on infrastructure. Many real implementations are just an existing cron job (or an equivalent scheduler) that happens to invoke an agent instead of a plain script, running briefly and exiting rather than staying resident.
Example
A daily digest agent might be scheduled to run every morning at 8am: it gathers what happened overnight (new issues, failed jobs, pending reviews), summarizes it, and posts or emails the result — with no one having to remember to ask for it.
How it differs
Scheduled agent vs. trigger: trigger is the general concept of whatever event starts a run; a scheduled agent is the specific, common case where that trigger is a recurring time-based schedule rather than a webhook, file change, or manual command.
Common misconceptions
FAQ
What is a scheduled agent?
Does a scheduled agent need to run 24/7?
Last checked: 2026-08-28