Triggers: How Custom Agents Start

A trigger is the very first node in every Custom Agent — the event that decides when a run happens. An agent has exactly one, and everything else flows from it. Choosing the right trigger is the difference between an automation you still have to remember to run and one that simply takes care of itself.

There are three families to pick from.

Run it yourself: the Normal Trigger

The Normal Trigger is the default. The agent runs when you press Run — nothing more. It's perfect while you're building and testing, or for workflows you genuinely want to kick off by hand.

Run it on a clock: schedules

When a job should happen on a rhythm, reach for a schedule. All schedules fire in your local timezone:

• Hourly — every 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, or 12 hours, on the hour
• Daily — once a day at a time you choose
• Weekly — on a specific day of the week, at a set time
• Monthly — on a specific day of the month (1–31), at a set time

Daily digests, weekly reports, end-of-month reconciliations — anything that lives on a calendar belongs here.

Run it on real events: integration triggers

The most powerful triggers react to things happening in the tools you already use. The moment the event occurs, your agent runs — with the event's data already available to the steps that follow.

• Gmail — New Email Received, New Email Matching Search, New Labeled Email, New Attachment Received, New Sent Email
• Google Drive — New File, New or Modified File, New or Modified Folder, Changes to Specific Files, New or Modified Comment, New Shared Drive
• Google Sheets — New Row Added, New Updates, New Worksheet, New Comment
• Google Calendar — New or Updated Event, Event Cancelled, Event Ended, New Calendar, Upcoming Event Alert
• Google Forms — New Form Response, Form Response Updated
• GitHub — New Commit, New or Updated Pull Request, New or Updated Issue, New Issue Comment, New Star, New Fork, New Release, and raw Webhook Events
• Telegram — New Updates, Message Updates, Channel Updates, New Bot Command Received

A new form response can be saved to a sheet and answered with a confirmation email. A new GitHub release can announce itself on Telegram. A new attachment in Gmail can be filed in Drive — automatically.

Deploy and stop

A Normal Trigger runs on demand. A schedule or event trigger needs to be deployed — once it is, the agent listens in the background and runs every time the condition is met, with no one watching. The agent shows as active while deployed, and you can stop it whenever you like to take it back offline.

Choosing the right trigger

A quick rule of thumb:

• Still building, or a true on-demand task? Normal Trigger.
• Should it happen on a rhythm? A schedule.
• Should it react the instant something changes somewhere else? An integration trigger.

Once the trigger is set, the rest of the agent is about what happens next — which is where control flow and the integration library come in.