A routine is a standing instruction. Instead of asking your assistant the same thing every Monday, you tell it once and it runs on its own.
This article covers:
- The two kinds of trigger
- What a routine can do
- When a routine is the wrong tool
The two kinds of trigger
Open AI Workspace → Routines and you will see routines grouped by how they start:
- Schedule — it runs at a time you choose. "Every weekday at 08:00." "The first Monday of the month." This is the common one.
- Event — it runs when something changes in the CRM: a record is created or updated, or a meeting ends. "Whenever a deal is won." "When a lead is assigned to me."
There is also a Webhook tab, for routines started by an external system.
Important: there is no "when a date arrives" trigger. To act a fixed period before something — 90 days before a renewal, say — use a scheduled routine that runs daily or weekly and works out the dates itself when it runs. That is the supported pattern and it works well; you just describe it that way when you set it up.
What a routine can do
Anything you could ask for in chat: query the CRM, summarise, research a company, draft emails, create or update records, post a report to your Inbox.
The same permission rules apply as in chat, and they matter more here because nobody is watching. A routine run by a read-only agent leaves its changes as proposals in your Inbox rather than writing them. If you want a routine to act unattended, the agent that runs it needs that specific permission — see How an agent earns a permission.
When a routine is the wrong tool
Routines are best when the output is judgement: a summary, a shortlist, a draft, a handful of flagged records for a person to act on.
They are a poor fit for bulk mechanical work across hundreds or thousands of records — "email every customer whose agreement renews next quarter", "update a field on all 4,000 open deals". For that, use the CRM's own automations and marketing flows, which are built for volume and behave identically every time. A good split is to let the routine find and summarise the cases, and let a flow handle the sending.