Automations

Schedule workflows to run automatically on set days and times

Automations run an agent's workflows on a recurring schedule, without anyone starting a conversation. Use them to fetch external data on a schedule, post periodic updates, generate reports, or kick off any task an agent can already handle on its own.

Open Designer > Automations to see every automation attached to the agent.

What Automations Unlock

Scheduling a workflow turns an agent from purely reactive into something that acts on its own clock. The same workflow you'd run inside a conversation can fire on a schedule or on demand, and every run is traceable back to the session it produced.

Schedule Recurring Runs

Pair any workflow with a day-of-week and time-of-day pattern

Trigger Workflows On Demand

Run any schedule immediately with Run Now, without waiting for the next slot

Audit Every Execution

Inspect status, duration, and the underlying session for each run

Creating an Automation

1

Start a New Schedule

Navigate to Designer > Automations and select Add Schedule to open the creation dialog.

2

Choose a Deployment and Workflow

Pick the Deployment that will host the run, then select the workflow to execute.

Automations always run through an API deployment. Make sure the agent has one set up before scheduling.

3

Pick a Cadence

Pick the days of the week and exact time the workflow should run on. The Timezone is your Workspace timezone and cannot be changed from the dialog.

4

Save the Schedule

Select Create Schedule to activate the schedule. It appears in the Automation table, active by default, and starts firing on its next scheduled slot.

Managing Automations

The Automations tab is where you manage every automation on the agent. You can see which of them are active, which failed last time they ran, and when each one is due next. Search by workflow name to find one quickly, or filter by status to focus on what needs attention.

From here you can pause an automation, run it on demand, or open it to change the days, time, or workflow it points to.

Three actions are available for any automation:

Edit

Re-open the automation in the Edit Schedule dialog to change days, time, deployment, or workflow

Run Now

Trigger the automation immediately, without waiting for its next slot

Delete

Remove the automation and stop all future runs

Execution History

Every automation keeps a record of all runs it has produced, so you can confirm whether it actually fired and investigate the ones that didn't. The history shows when each run happened, how long it took, and whether it succeeded. When something looks wrong, jump straight to the underlying session in Observatory to see what the workflow actually did.

Tracking Executions in Observatory

Every execution links to the Observatory session it produced via the action button. Open the session to replay the workflow, inspect variables, and confirm the run did what you expected. Sessions from automations are tagged AUTOMATION_<workflow-slug>_<id> and recorded with the contact type Scheduled Flow.

Filter by automation: Use the automation tag to isolate one schedule's history, or filter by the contact type to see every automation run across the agent in one view.

How Scheduled Runs Behave

A scheduled run is not a live conversation. When the schedule triggers, the workflow runs without a user message to react to, so build it to do useful work on its own from the moment it starts. Apart from the missing user message, everything else works the same. Plugins, knowledge retrieval, LLM nodes, and integrations behave the same as in a conversation.

Each execution can run for up to 30 minutes before the platform stops it. The default fits multi-step workflows that legitimately take minutes to complete.

Exactly once on timeout: If a scheduled run hits the timeout, the platform does not retry it. Each trigger produces exactly one execution, which keeps non-idempotent workflows (orders, tickets, payments) from running twice.

Best Practices

• Design for no user input: Scheduled workflows start with an empty session. Make sure the first node knows what to do without a prompt.

• Test with Run Now first: Validate the workflow once on demand before relying on the schedule

• Watch the Last Run filter: Bookmark the Failed filter on Active schedules to spot drift early

• Pause instead of delete: Toggling Active off preserves the schedule and its history, which is safer than deleting during incident response

You can now schedule workflows to run on set days and times, trigger them on demand, and trace every execution back to the session that produced it.