Schedule an automation

Who can do this

In a private feature, the owner (any User) can create automations. In shared features, creation requires Admin. The Mailbox trigger requires Admin wherever it is used — binding a connected mailbox is Admin-only, so the trigger isn’t offered to anyone else. Any member can view the automations they have access to. Investigate with Ronja additionally requires Build mode access (enabled per account by an administrator).

An automation pairs one trigger with one action. Like most resources, you create automations by asking Ronja in an exploration; the Automations page is where you monitor and manage them.

Create one

1. Open an exploration.
2. Ask for the automation — the product’s own suggestion: “Schedule a daily revenue summary every morning at 9 AM”.
3. Let Ronja author or find the Workflow or Saved Agent first — the action must exist before it can be scheduled.
4. Find the result on the Automations page, with run history and health at a glance.

The Automations page: every trigger–action pair, its schedule, and its recent runs.

Triggers and their allowed actions

Trigger	Fires when…	Can run
Schedule	a cadence you set — minimum interval is 1 hour	Workflow or Saved Agent
Email	mail arrives at the automation’s private Routable address	Saved Agent only
Webhook	JSON is POSTed to the automation’s Receiver URL	Saved Agent only
Table	a watched table finishes rebuilding	Workflow or Saved Agent
Event	a custom event is emitted in your organization	Workflow or Saved Agent
Mailbox	new mail arrives in a connected mailbox	Saved Agent only

The trigger kind is fixed at creation (“Trigger kind cannot be changed after creation.”). Field-by-field detail lives in Automation triggers.

Whoever can reach the trigger can run AI on your data

Email, webhook and mailbox triggers run AI-generated actions on content from outside your organization. Whatever can reach the trigger — a matching sender, anyone holding the URL, or anyone who can email a connected mailbox — can make Ronja act. Lock them down (allowlist, signing secret, filters) as shown below.

A mailbox trigger is the strongest case of this, because its filters are optional and Ronja answers as your organization’s own address. Leave the filters blank — which is the normal setup for a support inbox — and any stranger who emails that inbox starts a Ronja run, whose reply arrives at its recipient looking exactly like mail from your company. Set the mailbox’s Compose recipients list, which is what bounds where a new email from that run can go. See Connect a mailbox.

Email. An admin must first set the organization’s Email-trigger ingest prefix (Organization → Approvals). The automation then gets a private address — copy it from the Routable address chip — and you must allowlist sender domains or addresses; an email trigger can’t be enabled with an empty allowlist.

Caution

The sender allowlist is the entire authorization — anyone matching it can fire the automation with external content. Keep it tight. Rotate invalidates the old address immediately.

Webhook. Copy the Receiver URL into the calling system. Add a Signing secret so requests must be signed (“Signed (HMAC)”); without one, “the URL is the secret”.

Caution

The signing secret is shown exactly once — copy it when it appears. An unsigned webhook can be fired by anyone holding the URL. Webhooks cap at 1,000 runs per rolling 24 hours.

Table. Pick the Watched tables — “The automation fires when any watched table finishes (re)building.” Up to 25 watched tables, capped at 50 runs per rolling 24 hours as a loop guard.

Mailbox. Pick the Watched mailbox, then optionally narrow what fires it under Filters (optional) — sender domains, sender addresses, subject terms, or attachments only. Sender domains match exactly (acme.com is not mail.acme.com), and if the mailbox has a Watched label set, only mail under that label reaches the trigger at all. Binding a mailbox requires Admin. Only mail that arrives after you enable the automation fires it; existing mail is never replayed.

References and pre-approved actions

When an automation’s action is a Saved Agent, two settings decide what that Saved Agent can actually reach and do while it runs with no one watching:

• What it can reach. An unattended Saved Agent can only touch resources you hand it. Add them under Declared references when you build the Saved Agent: a table it should read, a connected mailbox it should answer, a secret it should use. Anything you don’t reference is out of reach for the run — this is the boundary that keeps a scheduled Saved Agent from wandering into data it was never given.
• What it may do without you. Some actions ask for your approval before they run in a chat — replying to or composing mail from a connected mailbox, for example. An automation has no one to approve each send, so you approve the specific actions it’s allowed to take on its own under Approved actions. Only those run unattended; anything else is refused. Approve only what you’re comfortable letting run without a person in the loop.

Approval emails

A workflow that stops for a decision part-way through a run mails its approvers one Review and decide link to the run page, where the decision is made. Automations fire such workflows perfectly well: the run starts normally and only stops if it reaches the step that asks. See Mid-run approvals and Approve a workflow run.

Legacy: a Pre-run approval gate can’t be automated

An older workflow may carry a Pre-run approval gate, shown on its page under that name and labelled Deprecated. It holds every run before it starts and can only be released in a chat, so an automation pointed at one fails closed rather than running unapproved. Its approvers get a different mail — “[Ronja] A workflow run needs your approval”, with Approve and Reject buttons that open a confirmation page; nothing is decided until you confirm there. Ask Ronja to convert the workflow to a mid-run approval instead; the approvers and delivery carry over. See Create a workflow.

Investigate a failing automation

When an automation’s most recent run failed — or several in a row did — its detail sidebar offers a hand-off straight into a chat that is already diagnosing it.

1. Open the automation from the Automations page.
2. Click Investigate with Ronja in the status strip at the top of the detail sidebar.
3. A new exploration opens in Build mode with the automation’s configuration and its recent runs already loaded, and Ronja already working out why it failed.
4. Read what she found, then approve the fix she proposes — she confirms with you before changing the automation, and test-runs it afterwards.

The button appears only while the automation is failing, and only for Admins who also have Build mode — repairing an automation edits it, which is an admin action. Without it, the same run history is on the sidebar below, and each failed run’s error is one click away.

A run sitting at Waiting is neither failing nor stuck: the automation fired a Durable workflow that paused mid-run — it handed work to a Saved Agent, or is waiting until a set time — and Ronja continues it by herself, then records the outcome on that same automation run. Nothing to investigate, and nothing to re-run. See Monitor runs and traces.

A run reading Awaiting approval is the one wait that does need somebody: the workflow reached a step it was told to check with a person on, and the named approvers have been emailed. It carries on the moment one of them approves, and fails if they reject it or nobody answers in time — see A run that is awaiting approval.

Pause, resume, run now, delete

1. Flip the on/off toggle on any row (or in the detail sidebar) to pause or resume. Paused email, webhook and mailbox automations silently ignore inbound traffic — and a resumed mailbox automation starts from that moment, so nothing that arrived while it was paused is worked through.
2. Click the run icon on a row (or Run now in the sidebar menu) for an immediate manual fire — refused while a run is already in flight.
3. Delete via the row’s trash icon (the Delete automation confirm). The automation moves to the Trash for 30 days and is auto-paused; an admin can restore it.