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Triggers control when your agents start working. By default, agents respond when you message them — but set up a trigger and they’ll run on their own, 24/7, with no maintenance required.

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Trigger types

  • On demand — @mention or DM Appy.AI in Slack or Teams and your agent gets to work immediately. This is how most interactions happen.
  • Scheduled — Agents run on a recurring schedule: daily, weekly, monthly, or at a specific time. Great for morning briefings, weekly competitive reports, or monthly performance summaries.
  • Integration triggers — External tools can kick off your agents automatically. When something happens in another system — like a new lead added to your CRM — your agent handles it.
  • Webhook — External systems trigger your agent by sending an HTTP POST request. This is how you connect your agent to tools like Zapier, Make, your CRM, or a form on your own website.
  • Email — Every agent has its own email address. Send it a message and it starts working on what you asked, with the email content as its task.
You can stack multiple triggers on the same agent. A reporting agent might run on a weekly schedule and also be available to message anytime for ad-hoc requests.
The easiest way to set up triggers is just to ask: “Send me a competitive update every Monday morning” or “Change my daily report to 6am instead of 8am.”

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Scheduled triggers

Scheduled triggers turn a one-time request into a standing instruction. Instead of asking your agent every Monday, it already knows it’s Monday — and shows up with the answer. Once a schedule is set, the agent will:
  • Wake up at the time you specified (in your timezone)
  • Carry out the task exactly as it would if you’d asked in chat
  • Deliver the result to your chosen destination (a DM, a channel, or a thread)
  • Repeat on the cadence you set, until you pause or remove it
The schedule runs whether your computer is on or off — Appy handles it in the cloud.

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Examples

  • “Every weekday at 8 AM, have Sarah send me a briefing of my calendar and any unread emails marked important.”
  • “Every Monday at 9, have Scout check what our top three competitors shipped last week and post a summary to #competitive-intel.”
  • “On the first of every month, have Lincoln pull an SEO audit on appy.ai and DM it to me.”
  • “Every Friday at 4 PM, ask Piper to surface 15 new leads matching our ICP and drop the list in #pipeline.”
You can include the destination (“DM me,” “post in #channel-name”), your timezone if it differs from the default, and any context the agent needs for that specific task. To change a schedule — time, destination, or cadence — just tell Violet: “stop my Monday competitive check,” “move my morning briefing to 7 AM,” or “have it go to #leadership instead.”

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Managing schedules

Violet is your control panel for scheduled work. To pause, change, or remove a schedule, tell her in chat. To see what’s currently scheduled, visit https://builder.appy.ai/schedules.
Why route everything through Violet? Violet has full context on your team — which agents you have, what they’re good at, and how they connect to your tools. Owning the schedule flow means nothing drifts out of sync with the agent running it.

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Webhook triggers

Webhook triggers let external systems kick off an agent by sending it an HTTP request — the connection point for Zapier, Make, your CRM, a form on your website, or any tool that can make a POST call. To set one up, tell the agent what should happen and what the trigger should be called — for example, “Set up a webhook trigger called new-lead that drafts an outreach email whenever it fires.” The agent creates the trigger and gives you back a unique URL:
Send a POST request to that URL from your external tool. The agent runs the task you defined when you set up the trigger, and if the request includes a body, that payload is attached to the run so the agent can reference “the incoming data” without you having to template it in.
Webhook trigger endpoints accept JSON, form-encoded, and multipart bodies — so a plain HTML form on your own website can post to a webhook trigger directly from the browser, no backend glue required. Endpoints also allow cross-origin requests, since the URL itself (not a cookie or API key) is the credential.

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Examples

  • Marketing agency — A new lead from a website form triggers an outreach sequence.
  • Business coach — A client completing an intake form triggers a welcome sequence.
  • SaaS company — A new trial signup triggers an onboarding email series.

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Email triggers

Every agent has its own email address. Send it a message — or forward one to it — and the agent starts working, with the email’s subject, body, and attachments passed along as its task. This is useful for forwarding an inbound request straight to the agent responsible for it, or for systems that can send email but can’t make an HTTP call. To find Violet’s address and manage who’s allowed to email her, open your avatar (bottom-left of the navigation) → Settings → Email. See Profile & Settings for the full allowlist details — admin-only, and worth checking first if an email trigger seems to be silently ignored.

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Getting started with triggers

Here’s how to set up your first triggers:
  1. Enable on demand. This should almost always be on. It lets you message your agent anytime.
  2. Identify routine tasks. What work happens on a schedule? Set up scheduled triggers for those.
  3. Connect external tools. If you use Zapier, Make, or other automation tools, set up a webhook trigger and connect them.
  4. Test each trigger. Make sure each one works the way you expect before relying on it.