An AI Agent on a Schedule — Morning Briefings and Routine on Autopilot
How to set up an AI agent that runs on a schedule: builds a morning briefing, tracks news, and handles routine tasks by cron — on its own, with no input from you. Using the Doka desktop agent as the example.
Most assistants only work when you open a chat and ask something yourself. But some tasks are repetitive: pull together a news summary by morning, check a status, prepare a digest before Monday. It makes sense not to do these by hand, but to hand them to an agent on a schedule. Here's how that works.
What "agent on a schedule" means
It's running a task through an AI on a timer — like cron, except an agent runs instead of a script. You describe what needs to happen once, and set when to run it. From there, the agent does the task on its own, and a finished result shows up for you.
In Doka there's a "Schedules" tab for this. Each run creates a separate temporary chat — the background task doesn't interfere with whatever you're working on right now.
Example: a morning briefing by 7:00
The most common scenario. Set a schedule for "every day at 07:00" and give the agent a request like: "Find the top news on my topic from the last 24 hours and put together a short summary." The agent searches, reads the pages, and has a finished briefing ready by morning — all that's left for you is opening the notification.
Other live scenarios:
- A weekday digest — a summary on a given topic every workday.
- A recurring check — the status of something every N minutes or hours.
- Prepping for the week — a task summary on Sunday evening.
A good scheduled request is specific and self-contained: what to find, over what period, and in what form to hand back the result. The agent runs it the same way it would if you'd typed it by hand.
How to set it up, step by step
- Open the right panel → the "Schedules" tab → add a new one.
- Pick a time: presets ("every day at HH:MM," "weekdays," "every hour," "every N minutes") or your own cron expression.
- Enter the request for the agent — exactly what to do.
- Choose where to send the result: a system notification and/or a chat in the panel.
Below the form, Doka shows a readout — "Will run: …" — so you can double-check the timing. You can click "Run now" to test it right away.
Important details
- Schedules run as long as the app is open — Doka lives in the tray and keeps running tasks even when the window is minimized. If the computer was off at the scheduled time, the missed run isn't caught up later.
- Scheduled runs happen "with you away from the computer," so the agent grants itself the tools it needs for that session — separate from your regular chats, where risky actions still ask for confirmation.
- Want a scheduled agent to check email, a tracker, or a messenger? Connect the relevant service through MCP and add it to the request.
Why this matters to you
A schedule turns an AI from "ask — it answers" into a background assistant that handles routine work on its own, right on time. Set up a morning briefing once, and it keeps showing up while you're busy with something else. You can try it right after installation.