Putting an agent on a task

Chat is for the back-and-forth. Tasks are for the work itself — a stable unit of work an agent can pick up, finish, and report on. Once you've put an agent on a task, the task becomes the audit trail: every run, every comment, every artifact lives there.

This article covers the one-time runs. Recurring cadences get their own article — Scheduling an agent.

The basic move

Open a task in any project. In the task panel, click the Assignee field. The picker opens with three groups: People, AI Agents, and AI Teams. Pick an agent. The task is now assigned, and the panel reshuffles to show the AI Schedule controls underneath.

A task has one assignee

Agents and humans don't share a task. Each task has one assignee: a person, an agent, or a team — never a mix. If your workflow is "agent drafts, human reviews," create two linked tasks and assign each to whoever does that step.

What changes when the assignee is an agent

A new AI Schedule section appears in the task panel with three controls:

Frequency — Off, Run now, Run once, Hourly, Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, Monthly.
Time — for Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, and Monthly. Pick from preset hours: 6 AM, 8 AM, 9 AM, 10 AM, 12 PM, 3 PM, 5 PM, 6 PM, 9 PM.
Days — for Weekly only. Pick one or more weekdays.

And a Run at datetime picker appears when Frequency is Run once, so you can pin a future moment.

The Due date field is hidden for AI-assigned tasks — the schedule replaces it, since the schedule already says when the agent will run.

Run now

The simplest pattern. Set the assignee, set Frequency to Run now, and save. The agent fires immediately, posts back to the task, and notifies you in the inbox when it's done. Use this when you want the work done once, right now.

Note that "Run now" is a Frequency value, not a button — there's no separate "Go" control. Saving with that value is what triggers the run.

Run once at a future time

Set Frequency to Run once and pick a date and time in the Run at field. The agent waits and fires at that moment. Good for "draft Tuesday's brief on Monday at 5 PM" without committing to a recurring cadence.

Recurring runs

Frequencies of Hourly, Daily, Weekdays, Weekly, and Monthly turn the task into a recurring assignment — the agent reruns the same task on the cadence you set. The setup, the patterns to use it, and what to watch for are covered in Scheduling an agent.

Where the output lands

Every run sends output to three places, depending on what the agent does:

Inbox. A summary of the completed run lands in your inbox every time. This is automatic and not configurable.
Task comments. Tool calls, conclusions, and any artifacts the agent produced are posted as comments on the task itself. The task is the audit trail.
Knowledge base. If the agent's tools include creating pages, drafts are saved into the knowledge base — either the agent's default output folder (set in its settings) or a folder it picks at runtime.

A few patterns

One-shot. Frequency = Run now. For "do this thing once, now."
Scheduled one-shot. Frequency = Run once, Run at = a specific datetime. For "draft Tuesday's brief on Monday at 5 PM."
Daily ritual. Frequency = Weekdays, Time = 9 AM. For morning briefs and inbox sweeps. Covered in Scheduling an agent.

Tips and gotchas

The AI Schedule section only appears when the assignee is an agent or a team. Reassign to a human and the section goes away (along with the schedule itself).
Output destination isn't configurable. Inbox notifications always send for completed runs; the agent's tools determine whether pages, tasks, or comments get created.
Switching the assignee from an agent back to a human cancels future runs of that task. The previous run history stays as comments.