How Do I Schedule an AI Agent to Run on Its Own?

I named the Triggers tab in the October 7, 2026 session (18:10), and in my setup video I build one from start to finish.

What is a trigger?

From my setup video. A trigger the simple version is like it's an alarm clock. It tells the agent when to wake up and when to do work.

In the live session I pointed at the same part of the builder.

From the recording, 18:10. I'm hovering over the word agent. Next to that is a word triggers access and settings. So there are four words there that are clickable that you can click into.

What are the four options?

The builder is Gumloop. On my relationship to it, I said this:

From the recording, 33:22. I don't work for Gumloop. I found this tool over the summer through Lenny's podcast, and I started using it and have since made myself an ambassador for them. I've created a relationship with Gumloop. I am not an employee.

More on that is in Do you work for Gumloop? (the answer from the session)

In the video I open the add menu on the Triggers area and read the choices.

From my setup video. Now, if we click on the box, the plus icon with the word add, it gives us four options, a drop down. The first one says create with AI, the second says app trigger, third, schedule trigger, and the fourth option is one-time trigger.

Choose one. This is how I describe each:

• Create with AI. The chat opens, and "the [AI] agent would start asking us questions to help set up a trigger." I name this for the case where "we're not sure of when we want this [AI agent] to work."
• App trigger. It runs "when an event occurs in another app." My example is a Slack message or a calendar event about a new booking, so that "your [AI] agent could prep you for a meeting when a new event is added to the calendar."
• Schedule trigger. It has a recurring setting and a one-time setting, in my words "reoccurring and one time." This is the one I picked.
• One-time trigger. I skipped it for meeting prep, because "you typically have more than one meeting over the course of your career."

Checked on 2026-11-05 against Gumloop's agent documentation, which describes the Triggers tab with these ways to add a trigger: Create With AI, App Trigger, Webhook, Scheduled Trigger and One-Time Trigger. The documentation lists five. My video names four, and screens change.

Why did I pick the schedule for meeting prep?

From my setup video. The third option, which is my preference for a meeting prep agent, is a schedule trigger, and I'll tell you why in a second.

My timing:

From my setup video. I'll run my meeting prep agent Sunday night through Thursday night around 7:00 p.m. because I like to prep for my day the night before.

My reason for the days:

From my setup video. One, I like to prep the night before, but I typically don't take meetings on Saturday and Sunday. So, I'm going to be responsible with my token usage and not max out tokens and have the agent working unnecessarily, so I set it to work the days that I work, okay?

Sunday to Thursday at about seven in the evening is my schedule, set around my own meeting days.

What are the steps, as my video showed them?

As shown in my setup video (captions pulled October 31, 2026):

1. 01

   Open the Triggers area and select the plus icon next to the word add.

2. 02

   Pick the third option, schedule trigger. I chose the recurring setting because meetings repeat.

3. 03

   Type the schedule in plain text. My text was "Run Sunday through Thursday at 7:00 p.m."

4. 04

   Select the generate box. In my words, it "formats a way that the [AI] agent needs to see it to run effectively."

5. 05

   Give the trigger a name. I used "meeting prep."

6. 06

   Select the black box at the bottom, create trigger. The screen returns to the previous view and the trigger is set.

On how often my AI agents run, I said in the live session:

From the recording, 25:15. Most of my agents, I have them running a couple of times a week.

What goes wrong

I named one thing, and it is about cost.

I set the schedule so the AI agent would not work unnecessarily.

From my setup video. And then Friday night and Saturday night my agent is not running. It's not using any credits for tokens.

My answer was to set the days to match my workdays. A page on what Gumloop credits are covers the unit I mention.

What my captions do not cover: how a trigger is paused or turned off, how many credits a run uses, and what happens to a run that is missed.

Where this comes from

This article grows from the session I taught live with Women Applying AI on October 7, 2026, and from my published setup video on YouTube, whose captions were pulled on October 31, 2026. The quoted passages are my own words, with the source named in each. The lists and steps around them were drafted by my team's AI agents from those words and my published pages, and checked against the recording before publishing. Platform details that have a public source carry a dated Checked on line.

Build Your First AI Agent in One Hour: the full session with the clips, the prompts and the transcript.

Related reading: Which Connectors Does an AI Agent Need?, What Are Gumloop Credits?, and What Should Your First AI Agent Be?.