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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
