Some questions come back every week. Which deals have a commitment due. What moved on the reorg since Friday. Who has gone quiet. Others come back with every meeting, or with every email from the same few people. Asking them by hand means remembering to ask.
An agent is that question, written once and answered when it matters. You give Brief the question and say when to answer it. It does the work while you are not there and reports back.
This is different from asking Brief something in chat. Chat answers you now. An agent answers you every Monday at seven, a day before each board meeting, or the moment a director emails you, whether or not you opened the app.
Set one up
Open Agents from the navigation and choose Create agent. Brief opens a chat and walks you through it. You can also describe one in any chat with Brief.
Describe what you want in your own words, and give it a name so you can find it later. Brief turns that into an agent: the question it asks, when it runs, the sources it reads, and what it is allowed to do.
When an agent runs
Every agent has one of four triggers.
On a schedule. Every weekday at 6:30, every Monday at seven, the first of the month.
Create an agent called Morning Ops. Every weekday at 6:30, tell me what's due across my projects this week, what slipped yesterday, and which decisions are still waiting on someone.
Say which timezone you mean if it is not the one you work in. A schedule without a timezone is the commonest way an agent reports at the wrong hour.
Around your meetings. A set time before a meeting starts or after it ends, up to a day either side. You choose which meetings count: only those with someone from outside your company, only those with at least a given number of people, or only those with people you name. All-day events are left out unless you ask for them.
Create an agent called Board Prep. A day before any meeting with any of these directors, tell me what each of them has raised with me since we last met and what I've committed to them.
When a message arrives. An email, or a Slack, Microsoft Teams or Google Chat message, from people you name, from anyone at a company's domain, or in a Slack or Teams channel you pick. It can also listen to your direct messages in those chat tools, and in a Slack channel it can be limited to messages that mention you. The agent runs once per conversation, not once per reply.
Create an agent called Board Watch. When any of these four directors emails me, tell me what they're asking and whether it touches something I've already promised them.
Only when you run it. An agent you start yourself from the Agents screen.
Where the answers arrive
An agent can report in your daily brief, as its own email, or as a push notification, and it can use more than one at once. The Agents screen shows which each of yours uses, under Delivery.
A scheduled agent reports in your daily brief unless you choose otherwise. An agent that runs around your meetings or on a message also sends a push notification, because its answer is usually needed before the next brief goes out.
In the daily brief, on the Today page and in the brief email alike, each agent gets its own section, titled with the agent's name, below the day's content. The title links to the agent. Each brief carries what your agents produced since the previous one. An agent that runs at six in the morning reports in the next brief after that, not the one that already went out.
To keep agent output out of the brief, go to Settings → Notifications and find Agent reports in the table of the Daily brief group. The row has two checkboxes: In the email removes the section from the daily email, and In the app removes it from your Today page. Clear either one or both.
Check on a running agent
Open Agents and choose one to see its trigger, its next run, and its recent runs with the output each produced. If a run failed, the reason is there.
Run now runs a scheduled or manual agent immediately, which is the fastest way to see whether the question you wrote produces the answer you wanted. Agents that run around meetings or on messages do not have it, because a run started by hand has no meeting or message to work on. Test one by waiting for the next matching meeting or message.
If several runs fail in a row, Brief stops the agent rather than leaving it to fail quietly. The Agents screen says so, and Resume starts it again once the cause is fixed.
Pause, change, or remove one
Pause stops an agent running without deleting it. Its history stays, and Resume picks it back up.
Delete removes an agent. Open it from Agents and choose Delete. It stops running and no longer reports into your brief. Changed your mind? Choose Undo before you leave the page.
To change what an agent asks or when it runs, tell Brief in chat. Ask it to change the agent by name and say what you want different.
How many you can have
Every account can have up to 10 agents. Paused agents count toward that limit, so pausing one does not free a place. Deleting one does. The Agents screen shows how many you have, next to the heading. It also sets how often an agent may run. Brief tells you in chat if the schedule you asked for is more frequent than your account allows.
An agent that runs on messages runs at most 50 times a day. Past that, the conversations it skipped are gathered into one extra catch-up run the next day, which covers the newest 25 and does not count toward that day's 50. When you set one up, Brief estimates how often it will run and suggests a daily summary instead if it would run a dozen times a day or more.
What an agent can do
An agent reads the sources you gave it and reports what it finds. An agent that is allowed to act can propose a reply to the email or Slack thread it is working on, or a post to a Slack channel you picked. A proposal waits on the Actions page for your approval unless you have set that action to Automatic. What Brief can do on your behalf covers those controls.
An agent only ever sees your data. It cannot read another person's mail or calendar, whatever the question asks for.
What an agent cannot do yet
These requests need chat today rather than an agent.
Read an outside system. Systems you connect through Composio or another MCP server, such as Excel, SharePoint, Salesforce or Zendesk, are available in chat and not to agents. An agent cannot read a workbook every Friday or tell you when a record changes. Ask in chat when you want it. See Connecting Brief to other systems with Composio.
Start something new. An agent cannot email someone new, message a person directly, or block time on your calendar. Have the agent report back, then ask chat to send the message or block the time. An agent with read-write access and Tasks as a data source can create tasks in Brief, though not in a connected task manager.
Reply in Teams. A Teams message can start an agent, but the agent reports back to you rather than replying in Teams.
Filter messages by topic. A message trigger filters by who sent it or where it was posted, not by what it says. "When anyone emails me about pricing" runs on every email. Name the senders or the domain, and put the topic in the question.
Hold notifications overnight. Agents that run around meetings or on messages send their push notifications when they run, at any hour.
Ideas by role
For agents and chat prompts built around a working week, see A CEO's week in Brief, A chief of staff's week in Brief, An operations leader's week in Brief and A sales leader's week in Brief.