Agent activation triggers

Waking an agent up without typing a message

An activation trigger is a rule that starts an agent on its own — on a schedule, when an email arrives, when something changes in your instance, or when another system calls Operator. The agent wakes up, receives a short note explaining why it was started, and does its job.

Every wake-up is recorded in the Events list, whatever caused it. If a wake-up produced no run, the entry says why — for example a filter that did not match, or a trigger that was switched off. The same occurrence is never run twice, even if it is delivered twice.

The kinds of triggers

Trigger	What it does	Example
Schedule	Wakes the agent at set times, in your timezone.	"Every weekday at 08:00", "the first Monday of every month".
Incoming email	The agent follows a mailbox — yours or a shared one — and reacts to arriving mail.	"Follow the sales inbox and answer product questions."
Event in your instance	Wakes the agent when data changes — a record is created, a document changes state.	"When a sales order is created, check the customer's credit limit."
Webhook	Another system calls Operator when something happens there.	"When the web shop gets a new order, start the fulfilment agent."

Schedules are a kind of event source: a Recurring Schedule describes the timing ("every Monday at 08:15", in a chosen timezone, optionally valid only between two dates), and each due occurrence wakes the agents bound to it.

Filters

A trigger can carry a filter so the agent wakes only for what matters. An email trigger can fire only for a specific sender or subject; an instance trigger can fire only for invoices, or only when a document reaches a specific state. Without a filter, every occurrence wakes the agent.

The activation note

Each trigger carries a short note that the agent receives when it wakes — for example "Check overnight orders and report anomalies." This is how the same agent can do different jobs depending on what woke it: the morning schedule says "prepare the daily digest", the email trigger says "answer this enquiry".

Approval mode matters

An unattended run cannot stop and ask you questions. If the agent needs to do something sensitive — send an email, change a record — the matching capability must be set to Auto, otherwise the run pauses and waits until someone opens the conversation and approves. The Agent Builder confirms with you before switching anything to Auto.

Managing triggers

Triggers live in the Triggers tab of the Agent Builder workspace. There you can:

see every trigger with a plain-English description of what it does;
switch a trigger on or off — a switched-off trigger never fires;
see the next run time of a scheduled trigger, in its own timezone;
open the run history and see exactly what the agent did on each wake-up;
edit or delete a trigger.

You can also just ask the Agent Builder in plain language: "Run every morning at 7 and check for overdue invoices" or "Follow my email and forward software enquiries to sales". The builder creates the trigger, sets the filter and the activation note, and tells you what it wired up.

Triggers on shared agents

When an agent is shared with you, you define your own triggers on it. Your triggers are yours: they wake the agent in your context, with your instances and mailboxes, and other people's triggers on the same agent are separate.