Cron task
A cron task is a scheduled action that fires on a recurring schedule (every weekday at 7am; first of every month; every Wednesday at 3pm). For AI agents, cron tasks let users delegate routines without configuring a workflow tool.
Why it matters
A cron task is the simplest scheduling primitive in software, dating back to UNIX. The pattern is "fire X on schedule Y." For an AI agent, exposing this primitive to non-engineers transforms what the agent can do for the user. Routines that previously required a custom workflow product or a calendar reminder system become a one-line text message.
Concrete examples:
- "Every weekday at 7am, send me my morning brief."
- "First of every month, pull my P&L and summarize."
- "Every Sunday at 6pm, check what's on my calendar for the week."
The user describes the cadence; the agent saves the cron expression and fires it. The user does not see a cron expression; the agent translates "every weekday at 7am" into the underlying schedule.
The infrastructure question is reliability. A cron task that misses its window is worse than no cron task; the user thought something would happen and it did not. Production-quality cron systems use heartbeat schedulers with redundancy.
How Ajeris handles this
Ajeris's scheduled task primitive supports cron tasks as one of three modes (cron, interval, one-shot). The user describes the schedule in natural language; the agent saves the structured task. A heartbeat scheduler ticks every 60 seconds and runs each due task as a full agent invocation.
Cron tasks can deliver to any channel the user wants (SMS, WhatsApp, email, voice). The agent handles the failure case: if the scheduler missed a tick, the task fires on next available tick rather than silently dropping.
