Triggers
Instructor
The most important part of your AI agent
The most important part of an AI agent is the trigger. Every AI agent starts with a trigger. The trigger is what tells the agent that it’s time to wake up and start doing work on your behalf. It’s important because without the right trigger, your agent might not wake up at the right time do the work it needs to do.
In this lesson, we’ll cover the four common types of triggers, when you want to use each one, and considerations for setting them up.
Four common types of triggers
Manual trigger
The simplest trigger! Like the name suggests, with a manual trigger, you’ll manually tell the agent when it’s time to wake up.
Example: You have an event coming up. You manually click a button to tell the agent to start sending emails out to guests.
Two flavors of manual trigger
You can set up your manual trigger to run for single items or batches of items. Regardless of which you use, there’s no guesswork of when the agent will wake up. It’s always up to you to click a button to kick things off.
Single-item triggers
If you want to run your agent on-demand on one item at a time, like on a single record or person, you’ll use a normal manual trigger.
Example: You’re researching candidates applying to a role at your company. When you want to run the agent, you give it information like their name and LinkedIn profile in a simple form, and it does internet research on just that one candidate.
Batch triggers
If you have multiple items that you want to process with your agent, you need a batch trigger. When you click the button for it to run, it will go through the items in the list and perform the same operations on each item in the list.
Example: You have a list of candidates for a role in a Google Sheet. You want to manually initiate research on all of them at once.
Example: You have a list of competitors you’re tracking in an Airtable. You want to manually check each of their pricing pages to see if they've been significantly updated since you last checked.
Scheduled triggers
Use a scheduled trigger to run your agent on a specified cadence. Unlike manual triggers, a scheduled trigger will start the agent automatically based on the passage of time. It’s useful for things you need to do every day, every week, or every month. You set the schedule just like how you’d schedule a recurring calendar event.
Example: Every day, give me a summary of all my customer calls from the past day.
Example: Every week, give my team an analysis of what our competitors are posting on YouTube.
Just like manual triggers, scheduled triggers can be set for a single item or batch of items.
Single item example: Every day at 8 a.m., look up all your external meetings for that day and send yourself a briefing over email.
Batch example: Every month, look at all the competitors in a Notion database and look up what they’ve been doing this month.
Batch example: Every week, look at all our top accounts in our CRM and give a summary of the account health.
App triggers
App-based triggers are the most common type of trigger. App triggers tell the agent to wake up in response to something happening in one of your tools, like a record being created or updated.
Example: When you receive an email with an invoice in Outlook, upload the attachments to Dropbox.
Example: When a new contact is added to your CRM in HubSpot, invite the person to an onboarding session in Google Calendar.
Example: When a new item is added to a Monday.com board, create a task in Asana for the appropriate owner.
Considerations for setting up an app trigger
When you’re setting up your app-based trigger, consider three things:
Which app are you listening to? It could be Gmail, Notion, Slack, Salesforce, or many, many others.
What event are you listening for? In Gmail, are you waiting for an email to be received, or a label to be added? In Salesforce, are you looking for new contacts, or updated records?
Of those events, which subset are you looking for? In Gmail, you might not want to trigger your agent for every emails, just the ones with “invoice” somewhere in the subject or body. You can add filters to get really specific about the subset of events you want to pay attention to.
Triggers from the outside world
You can tell your agent to wake up any time it detects a specific change in the outside world. These outside world triggers include RSS triggers as well as the more advanced mailhook and webhook triggers.
RSS trigger example: Track when a new video is posted to a competitor’s YouTube channel, share the link with your team over Slack.
Mailhook trigger example: When a contractor emails job details to a unique mailhook email address, log the information in Airtable.
Webhook trigger example: You configure an internal company tool to post an HTTP request every time a new customer signs up for your service so you can notify your team.
Follow a feed with RSS triggers
One useful outside-world trigger is the RSS trigger. RSS feeds are a way for online publishers to alert subscribers to new content. Traditionally they were used for blogs, but now tons of online sources have them! This includes:
Every YouTube channel
Every subreddit
Many official governing bodies
Any Google alert
When you’re setting up your RSS trigger, you need to do two things:
Find the URL for the RSS feed link: You need an RSS feed link to get RSS updates. This is not a normal URL for a website or YouTube channel. We’ve found that asking ChatGPT is usually the quickest way to get this link! (You can also find it manually by inspecting the page source and looking for the link with “rss” in it.)
Set up filters: If you don’t need to process every single update to a feed, just add a filter to only trigger your agent when the update meets your criteria, like containing specific keywords.
Now you know
You now know all about the most important part of an AI agent, the trigger!
You know how to wake up your agent so it will start doing work on your behalf at the right time
You know the four kinds of common triggers: manual, scheduled, app, and outside world
You know when to choose each one
Hopefully, you also now have some ideas of the kinds of triggers you’d like to use when you build your first AI agents!
Next, we’ll look at how we can use that trigger to start doing useful work on your behalf.
