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An automation is Zo running a prompt on a schedule. Same Zo, same files, same tools, same integrations, just running on its own when you’re not in the conversation. If you can ask Zo to do something in chat, you can ask it to do that thing every morning, every Friday afternoon, or on any cadence you describe. To create one, just ask Zo: “every weekday at 8am, summarize my calendar and email it to me.” Zo reads that as a schedule, writes the prompt, and confirms before saving. You can also open the Automations tab and hit + to set one up by hand.

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Good fits for an automation

The best automations have two things in common: they want fresh context every time they run, and they save you from having to remember to ask. Some patterns that work well: Example prompts you can copy and adapt:
Morning briefing
Page watcher
Routine report
If you’d write the same prompt in chat more than twice a month, it probably wants to be an automation.

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Schedules

Tell Zo when to run in plain English and it’ll parse the cadence:
  • “once, tomorrow at 6pm”
  • “every weekday at 8am”
  • “every hour”
  • “the first Monday of every month at 9am”
  • “every 15 minutes” (for short polls)
You can edit the schedule later from the automation’s row in the Automations tab, or just ask Zo to change it.

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Delivery and notifications

By default, an automation runs quietly and writes its result to chat history. You decide how, and whether, it reaches you: Often the most useful pattern is conditional notifications. Ask Zo to ping you only when something is true, and the automation becomes a filter instead of another inbox:
  • “Text me only if the deploy failed.”
  • “Email me the digest only if there are unread VIP messages.”
  • “DM me only when the price drops below $400.”
If an automation should run the same multi-step routine every time, capture the steps as a skill and have the automation invoke the skill. That way you can also run it on demand from chat, and the prompt stays in one place.

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Reviewing what ran

Every automation run is a real Zo conversation, saved to your chat history. Open the Automations tab, click any task, and you’ll see each past run, the prompt it executed, the tools it used, and the output. If a run misfires, ask Zo to look at it: “open last night’s run of my morning brief and tell me why the calendar section was empty.” Zo can debug the run and fix the schedule or the prompt.

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What to keep in mind