Duties, the work agents do on their own.
A duty is a piece of work an agent does by itself: on a schedule, when something changes in Stable Baseline, or when mail arrives in a connected mailbox. You decide what it may use, and how far it may go before a person approves.
When a duty runs
| Starts | For example |
|---|---|
| On a schedule | Every weekday morning, every hour, the first of the month |
| When something changes here | A document changes; a row is added to a table or changes; a task or improvement is added or changes; a plan or a phase changes; a task becomes overdue; a meeting ends |
| When something arrives in a connected app | Mail arrives in a connected Microsoft 365 mailbox |
| When someone messages the agent | Coming soon, with Microsoft Teams, Slack and WhatsApp |
Schedules can repeat every few minutes or hours, daily, monthly, once, or on a custom pattern; the editor shows the next three times it will run. How often a duty can run depends on your plan. Changes an agent makes itself never start its own duties.
Give an agent a duty
Open the agent's Duties tab and press New duty
You need to be able to manage the agent. A new agent offers a few starting points.When
Choose how it starts, and what exactly it watches for.What to do
Name it and write its instructions in plain words (up to 8,000 characters). Add an example of a good result if it helps.What it may use
The connected mailboxes it may use, each at a level (read only, read and draft, read, draft and send, or send only); the places it may read; and its tools, only what this duty needs or all the agent's tools.How far it may go alone
Outside Stable Baseline: drafts only, ask before each send, or send on its own. Inside Stable Baseline it can be stricter than the agent's usual approvals, never looser. Name an owner and up to five backups to approve its requests, which wait up to 72 hours.More settings, then save
Which events count, how many runs a day, a monthly credit limit and the time zone. Then Save duty.
A safety check on every duty
Replies to mail
- When to reply: only when a message needs it, or every message.
- Who replies go to: everyone on the message, the sender only, or the people you list.
- Allowed email domains: set by owners and admins. A duty never replies to anyone outside them.
- A signature.
Only owners and admins can let a duty send mail on its own.
Watch it work
Each duty has its own page: its health, today's runs, recent runs, credits and setup. A run is waiting to start, running, waiting for approval, paused, done, failed or cancelled. When a run needs a person, its proposal appears in the agent's Approvals and on the Approvals page.
What a duty costs
| A run that | Credits |
|---|---|
| Checks an event and finds nothing to do | 1 |
| Acts: a draft, a reply or a change | 5 |
| Works unusually long | More |
| Is skipped because the event does not match its filters | 0 |
| Runs on your organisation's own AI | 0 |
Filters are checked before any work starts, so events that do not match cost nothing. Asking an agent yourself stays free.
- Set a monthly credit limit on one duty, or Set a cap for all of an agent's duties. Owners and managers are told when an agent reaches 80 per cent of its cap, and at a limit the duty pauses until next month.
- If your organisation runs out of credits, duties that use them pause and start again by themselves once there are credits. What arrives meanwhile is kept for up to 7 days.
Pause a duty
Pause a duty and what arrives is kept, and runs when you resume it. Owners and admins can Pause every duty in the organisation at once; what arrives is kept for up to 7 days.
Who can do what
- Anyone who manages an agent can add duties to it.
- A duty's owner can also edit or delete it, and its backups can pause it.
- Limits on duties and runs depend on your plan. Usage, at the top of the Agents page, shows them. See pricing.