Scheduled Tasks
Let an agent run on a timer. Set up a recurring brief, report, or check, choose whether the result arrives by email or waits in botts.ai, and see what each run cost.
A scheduled task is a personal recurring agent run. You write the instruction once ("check our suppliers' status pages and flag anything that changed"), pick a rhythm, and the agent does it on schedule. Every result is saved to a chat conversation, and optionally emailed to you.
Scheduled tasks live under Scheduled at the top of the Chat page's conversation list, just below New Chat. The number next to it is how many of your tasks are switched on. In endless chat, use the Scheduled link in the chat header.
same knowledge and tools as chatting by hand
saved to a chat, emailed or left unread
No credits? The run is skipped, not queued. It is not made up later.
Three failures in a row? The task pauses itself and emails you.
Personal, not organizational
A task belongs to the account that created it, not to the organization. The task list is yours alone: Admins and Owners get no shared view of everyone's schedules, and no one can edit, run, or delete someone else's task.
The results follow the internal-chat rules rather than the task's ownership, because a run posts into an ordinary internal-chat conversation. Under the default Private policy, Admins and Owners see only its metadata. Under Full, they can read the content, the same as any other internal chat. Each conversation snapshots the policy in force when it was created. See Internal-chat privacy and oversight.
Who can create one
Anyone who can use the chat can create a scheduled task, which includes the chat-only Member role. What a task is allowed to run is bounded by what you could do by hand:
- A deployed agent: only agents you are allowed to chat with. An invite-only or role-restricted internal chat you have no access to is not schedulable, and the agent must be active.
- A model directly: the same general-purpose models the regular chat offers you. If your organization has switched Regular Chat off, a plain-model task is refused too, and the model must satisfy your organization's server location setting, because a schedule runs unattended.
Creating a task needs credits, because naming it calls a model.
A task reaches exactly what the agent reaches
A scheduled run is the same conversation you would have typed by hand, so it can use the agent's knowledge bases, its connections, and web search if that agent has it. It has no special view of the platform: it cannot read the Conversations hub, other members' chats, or your usage figures. Ask for something its tools can actually fetch, or it will produce a confident summary of nothing.
Creating a task
Describing it in one sentence
The Scheduled page has a box where you can type the whole thing at once: "summarise the news every Monday at 8". botts.ai reads it and opens the wizard with the fields filled in for you to confirm.
It deliberately stops at the wizard rather than creating the task outright. Phrases like "every other Monday" or a timezone-shifted "tonight" are exactly what a model gets wrong, and a schedule nobody confirmed would run unattended and spend credits. If the sentence can't be read, the wizard opens with your sentence as the instruction and leaves the schedule for you to set step by step. A one-off such as "remind me on 1 November" is understood too, and fills in the same start and end date.
The wizard
What
Choose the agent (or the model) and write the instruction. Write it like a message to a colleague, and point it at something the agent can reach.
When
Pick the frequency and time, and optionally a start and end date. Times are shown in your own timezone, taken from your browser.
Where
Choose how you're told: Email or Just in botts.ai. The result is saved either way.
Try it
Optional. Run it once now to see what it sends and what it costs.
Frequency
| Option | What you pick |
|---|---|
| Daily | Just the time |
| Weekly | Which weekdays, plus the time |
| Monthly | Which days of the month (1–31), plus the time |
Months that are missing a selected day run on their last day instead, so a task set to the 31st still runs in February. It runs once in such a month, however many of the selected days are missing.
A task can also have a Start on (optional) date, before which it does not run, and a Stop after (optional) date. The run on that last day still happens, and then the task stops. To run something just once, set both dates to the same day. The list then shows the task with a Once badge and that date. A task with no runs left switches itself off, and you restart it by giving it a new date.
Delivery
| Channel | Behavior |
|---|---|
| Each result lands in your inbox. | |
| Just in botts.ai | The result waits for you, marked unread. |
Either way the run is written into a chat conversation belonging to the task, so the full result is always readable in Chat and the history builds up in one place.
In the Chat list, task conversations are grouped under Running for you. Each one shows the schedule at the top with an Edit link, and every run starts with a dated divider. If a run failed or was skipped, the thread says so where the answer would have been, gives the reason, and offers Run now. You can reply in the thread to ask follow-up questions. Emails carry the first 4,000 characters of a result plus a link to the full one.
Trying it before you turn it on
The last step offers Run it once now. It takes about a minute, costs credits like a real run, and shows you the actual output and its exact cost before you commit to a rhythm. This is the cheapest way to find out that an instruction is ambiguous.
Managing tasks
The Scheduled page lists your tasks with the task name, its schedule, whether it is working, the last result, and the cost this month.
| Action | What it does |
|---|---|
| Run now | Runs the task immediately, outside its schedule. A task already running is not started twice. |
| Pause / Resume | Stops and restarts the schedule without losing the task or its history. |
| Edit | Changes the task name, the instruction, the schedule and its dates, or the delivery channel. The agent or model is fixed when the task is created; to switch it, create a new task. |
| Click the row | Opens the conversation holding every past run. |
| Delete | Stops the task. The conversation with its past results is kept. |
Run status
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Delivered | The run finished and the result was saved (and emailed, if that's the channel). |
| Running… | The run is in progress. |
| Failed | The run errored or took longer than 15 minutes. The reason is shown in translated form. |
| Skipped (no credits) | The organization had no credits at the scheduled moment. Nothing was charged and nothing was sent. |
If the agent's Chat (Internal) deployment has a backup model and the primary model's provider fails during a run, the run switches to the backup and starts the answer again, unless a tool that changes something (such as a form submission) has already run. Tasks that run a model directly have no backup.
If botts.ai could not run a task at its scheduled time, for example during maintenance, the run happens late as long as it is less than 24 hours overdue. Several missed runs are made up only once. A run more than 24 hours overdue is skipped: it appears as Failed in the list and you get an email saying the task did not run. Missed runs never count toward automatic pausing.
Automatic pausing
Every failed run emails you, so a broken task doesn't go unnoticed until the next time you look. After three consecutive failures, including failures of Run now, the task pauses itself and you get a pause email instead. The list marks it Paused, and hovering the badge shows "Paused after repeated failures". This stops a broken instruction, or an integration that has gone away, from quietly burning credits every morning. Fix the cause and press Resume.
Some changes stop a task immediately instead. If you lose access to the agent a task runs, the task pauses. If a task runs a model directly and your organization's Server Location setting no longer allows that model, or Regular Chat is switched off, the task is turned off at its next run and you get an email. Resuming does not help in these cases, because a task's agent or model can't be changed. Re-create the task with an agent or model you can use.
Asking an agent to schedule something
You do not have to open the Scheduled page at all. In chat you can ask the agent to set something up ("send me this summary every Monday", or "remind me once on 1 November"), and it creates the task for you. The transcript shows a Scheduled task created marker, and the task then appears on the Scheduled page like any other. You can also ask the chat to list your tasks, change one, pause it, or delete it (shown with a Scheduled tasks marker). Inside a task's own conversation, "change it to 10am" changes that task rather than creating a new one. The shortest interval is once a day, and tasks created in chat deliver in botts.ai unless you ask for email.
Cost
A scheduled run is billed exactly like the same conversation typed by hand: the model's usage in credits, plus whatever tools it uses. Two things follow from that:
- The cost this month column is the honest number to watch. A daily task is thirty runs.
- Runs are skipped, not queued, when the organization is out of credits. A skipped run is not made up later.
Tip
Ask for the output you actually want to read. "Summarise the top five themes in under 150 words" costs a fraction of "give me a full report" and is far more likely to be read on a Monday morning.
Related
- Conversations →: where the results are saved, and how internal chat privacy works.
- Agents →: configuring the agent a task runs.
- Team & Billing →: credits, and what happens when they run out.
Last updated on October 15, 2026