Trigger — what starts a run

A trigger is what wakes your AI Team up. Everything else on the canvas says what the team does; this is the only thing that says when.

Add one from the canvas toolbar: Add trigger. It sits above the Sequence, because a run flows downward and the thing that starts one belongs at the top.

Until triggers existed, a solution only ran because somebody pressed Run. That rules out a large part of what businesses actually want: fee reminders, repayment follow-ups, invoice chasing, reorder prompts, the monthly review, termly report cards. None of those has anyone sitting there at nine in the morning to press anything.

Three kinds

When called — the customer's own system posts to your project's endpoint. A web form, a shopping cart, a loan application, their CRM. This one needs no schedule; it happens when they make it happen. Set the keys up under Settings.

On a schedule — a clock. Nobody has to be watching, and nobody has to remember.

When something changes — looks for what's new on a timer and treats each one as its own run. Declared on the canvas; not doing anything yet.

Saying when

Schedules are written in words, not in cron:

0 9 * * 1-5 is correct and unreadable. This is a pill you will turn your laptop round and show a school administrator, and somebody who mistypes a cron line finds out a week later when the reminders didn't go.

Monthly runs are capped at day 28. The 29th, 30th and 31st don't exist in every month, so a monthly report set for the 31st would quietly skip February — and a monthly report that misses a month is worse than one that runs on the 28th.

Whose clock

Every schedule carries its own timezone, and it defaults to Africa/Lagos.

This is not a nicety. A school that reads "09:00" and whose reminders arrive at 08:00 has been let down by a default. The timezone travels with the trigger, so a customer in another country still gets nine o'clock their time — and it keeps working after the expert who set it up has moved on.

Run it late if we missed it

A checkbox, and it's worth thinking about rather than leaving on:

• On for work that still needs doing. If we were down at nine, chase the unpaid fees at ten.
• Off for anything time-bound. A 5pm summary arriving at 9am the next morning is yesterday's news, and sending it is worse than not sending it.

One run, or one per row

A trigger normally starts one run. Tick Run it once for each row and it starts one per row instead — one per unpaid family, per abandoned cart, per overdue invoice, each with its own trace.

That is a page of its own: Run it once for each row.

Joining it to the Sequence

Drag from the dot on the bottom of the trigger to the top of the step that should run first. A trigger with nothing joined to it is drawn, but reaches nothing.

A trigger has no dot on top, because nothing can come before the beginning.

More than one

A project can have several, and they can point at the same first step or at different ones.

Three triggers reaching one step is an omnichannel inbox — WhatsApp, email and a web form all arriving into the same handling. Two triggers reaching different steps is also fine: a nightly sweep starts at one place, a customer's cart posted in starts at another, and each one enters where you drew it.

Switching one off

Untick Switched on. The trigger keeps its rule and its history and simply stops firing, so you can put it back later without retyping anything.

Questions people ask

I set a schedule. How do I know it's really going to run? If the rule can't be read, the form refuses to save it and tells you what it does understand. If it saved, it's armed.

Why won't it accept my rule? It only knows the five shapes in the table above. evry day, 9am, every morning and cron lines are all refused — deliberately, and while the form is still open, rather than being accepted and quietly never firing.

Does the schedule cost anything when nothing happens? No. A trigger that hasn't fired costs nothing. A run costs whatever that run costs.

Can I make it run right now to test it? Press Run in the studio. That runs the Sequence the same way, so you can see it work without waiting for nine o'clock.

What happens if a run is still going when the next one is due? Each firing is booked before the run starts, so the schedule keeps its own time rather than drifting later and later behind a slow run.

Could a reminder go out twice? No. If something fails midway, that firing is missed rather than repeated — a deliberate choice. For work that messages real customers, a reminder that didn't arrive is an apology; the same reminder twice is a complaint.

I deleted a trigger. Did that stop the schedule? Yes, and the confirmation says so. The schedule goes with the pill.

Does it run in my timezone or the customer's? Whichever you typed into the trigger. The default is Lagos.

Related: Sequences · Working on the canvas · Task · Running agents