How to Automate Anything with Zo Agents

A scheduled agent is an AI that runs on its own, on a schedule you set, without you doing anything. It's not a workflow builder with drag-and-drop nodes. It's not a Zapier chain. You tell your Zo what to do, how often, and where to send the results. That's it.

This is one of the things that separates Zo from every chatbot. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, they answer when you ask. Zo acts when you're not there.

What agents actually do

An agent is an instruction + a schedule + a delivery method.

• Instruction: "Search for the latest AI news and summarize the top 5 stories."
• Schedule: "Every morning at 7am."
• Delivery: "Send it to me via email."

When the schedule fires, your Zo wakes up, executes the instruction using all of its tools (web search, email, file access, APIs, everything), and delivers the result through your chosen channel.

No tokens to configure. No API chains to build. Your Zo already has the tools. The agent just tells it when to use them.

Set up your first agent

Your Zo creates the agent. Tomorrow at 7am, you get a text with your news digest. Every morning after that, the same.

Want to change it? Tell Zo: Update my morning news agent to include "climate tech" and send via email instead of SMS. Done. Changes take effect on the next run.

Agent ideas worth stealing

Morning briefing. Your calendar for the day, unread email summary, weather, and top news. Delivered before you wake up.

Price monitor. Track a product price and get alerted when it drops.

Competitor tracker. Monitor a competitor's website or social media for changes.

Weekly report. Summarize your week's work from Linear, Gmail, and Calendar.

Content digest. Follow specific topics across the web.

Conditional alerts. Agents don't have to send you something every time.

How agents compare to Zapier and n8n

The tradeoff: Zapier workflows are deterministic. They do the exact same thing every time. Agents are intelligent. They adapt to what they find. If the news site changes its layout, the agent still extracts the stories. If your email format changes, the agent still summarizes it.

For most personal automation, agents are easier to set up, cheaper to run, and more flexible than workflow builders.

Managing your agents

See all your agents in the Automations tab, or just ask:

• Show me all my active agents
• Pause my morning briefing agent
• Delete the price monitor agent
• Change my weekly report to run on Thursdays instead

Delivery options

Agents can deliver results through:

• SMS. Text message to your phone. Best for alerts and short summaries.
• Email. Full formatted message. Best for digests and reports.
• Telegram. Rich formatting, file attachments. Best for technical output.
• No delivery. Agent runs silently and writes results to your workspace. Good for data collection.

Getting started

Start with one agent. The morning briefing is the best first agent because you see the results immediately the next morning and can iterate on the format.

Once that's running, build from there. Most Zo users end up with 3 to 5 agents handling the parts of their day that are predictable enough to automate. Agents can even launch Claude Code headlessly to automate coding tasks like running test suites, fixing failures, and opening PRs.

For more on the philosophy behind prompt-driven automation, read Skip the Todo, Just Write the Prompt.