How to automate repetitive work with AI agents

A lot of work is repetitive: gathering the same sources every week, summarising them, drafting the same kind of update. AI agents can take a goal and carry out the steps for you. Here’s what an AI agent is and how to set one up.

What is an AI agent?

Unlike a single chat reply, an agent works toward a goal in multiple steps — deciding what to do, using tools like web search or your knowledge base, and adapting as it goes. You describe the outcome you want; it figures out the how.

1. Describe the goal

In the Agents section, write your goal — for example, “every Monday morning, find the week’s top news on [topic], summarise it, and prepare a short briefing.” The agent plans the steps it needs.

2. Set limits you’re comfortable with

Agents run inside spend caps you control — per run and per day — so a task can never quietly run up a big bill. You can also require approval before it acts on anything sensitive.

3. Run it once or on a schedule

Trigger an agent on demand, or set it to run on a schedule. Scheduled agents notify you only when there’s something worth seeing, so you’re not buried in updates.

4. Review and refine

Every run keeps a history you can review, and you can edit the steps to tune the result. Over time you build a small set of reliable, automated tasks.

Good first tasks to automate

• Weekly research briefings on a topic you track.
• Summaries of documents in your knowledge base.
• Drafting recurring updates from a set of sources.

Agents use the best AI at each step and your own knowledge base where relevant, so the output is grounded in your facts. See how the rest of FlowGuild works, or try it →