How to Schedule Your AI Agents on Macha (Recurring Runs)
Not every automation should wait for an event. Sometimes you want an agent to run on a clock — every morning, every hour, every night. Macha calls these Scheduled Runs, and they're perfect for recurring jobs like a daily ticket report, an hourly SLA check, or a nightly summary. Here's how to set one up.
Watch it
A scheduled run is just a trigger
The mental model is simple: a Scheduled Run is a trigger — but instead of firing on an event in a connected app, it fires on a time. Everything else works the same: the agent runs its instructions when the schedule says so.
Set one up
- Open the agent you want to run on a schedule.
- Go to its Triggers and click Add Trigger.
- Scroll to the bottom to find the Macha triggers, and select Scheduled Run.
- Choose the frequency — common options are every day, every 4 hours, or every hour — and set the start time you want.
- Save. From now on, the agent runs automatically on that schedule, following its instructions.
That's it — the agent will fire on the cadence you picked without anyone lifting a finger.
A real example: a daily ticket report
A classic use is a morning report. Set up an agent whose instructions are: "Check Zendesk for tickets in the 'billing' category opened in the last 24 hours, count them, and post a summary to our #support Slack channel." Give it a Scheduled Run every day at 9am, and every morning your team gets a fresh billing-tickets summary in Slack — no one has to run a report.
Swap the instructions and the same pattern covers all sorts of recurring work: hourly SLA-breach checks, nightly backlog summaries, weekly trend digests.
Good to know
- How many you can run. Each account supports up to 3 scheduled runs (Professional; Enterprise allows more), so use them for your highest-value recurring jobs.
- Minimum cadence and guardrails. Schedules run on at least an hourly cadence, with sensible caps (a daily limit per schedule and an org concurrency cap) and an auto-disable if a schedule errors repeatedly — so a misconfigured job can't run away.
- One place to manage them. You can see and manage all your scheduled runs together, so it's easy to keep track of what's firing when.
When to use a schedule vs. an event trigger
- Event trigger (e.g., Ticket Created) → when the agent should react to something happening.
- Scheduled Run → when the agent should do something on a cadence, regardless of events — reports, checks, digests, cleanups.
If your job is "every morning…" or "every hour…", it's a schedule. If it's "whenever X happens…", it's an event trigger.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Scheduled Run? A trigger that runs an agent on a time-based cadence (daily, hourly, etc.) instead of on an event.
How do I set it up? On the agent's Triggers, add a trigger, scroll to the Macha triggers, pick Scheduled Run, then choose the frequency and start time.
How often can it run? At least hourly; you choose from options like every hour, every 4 hours, or daily.
How many scheduled runs can I have? Up to 3 on Professional (more on Enterprise).
What's a good use case? Recurring jobs — a daily ticket report to Slack, hourly SLA checks, nightly summaries.
The bottom line
A Scheduled Run is a time-based trigger: add it to an agent, pick the cadence and start time, and the agent runs itself on a clock. It's the cleanest way to automate recurring work like daily reports — set it once and it just keeps happening.
Schedule your first run: set an agent to post a daily ticket summary to Slack. 7-day free trial, no credit card required. Start free.
