Background Agents

Scheduled tasks that run an AI agent on a prompt you define.

Overview

Background agents are scheduled tasks that run an AI agent on a prompt you define. They go out, research, and update your data on a timer — without you being there.

When they run — on a schedule (daily, hourly, weekly) or manually

Example prompts

A background agent is just a prompt that runs on a timer. Some examples:

“Update the competitor pricing table with current prices from their websites.”
“Check for new job postings on stripe.com/jobs and add any new ones to the jobs table.”
“Refresh the weather data for all cities in the locations table.”

Each run, the agent reads the prompt, looks at the current workbook state, and does whatever work is needed.

Capability levels

Each background agent has a capability level that controls how much compute it uses:

Level	Best for
Low	Simple updates — refresh a few rows, check a single source
Medium	Standard research — multiple sources, moderate complexity
High	Deep research — many sources, complex analysis, large datasets

Detail panel

Click a background agent in the automations panel to see:

An editable prompt field — the instructions the agent follows each run
Capability level selector (Low / Medium / High)
Schedule configuration
Enable/disable toggle
Color selector
Run button
Last run result, with a View agent run link to see what the agent did

Python Automations

Reactive calculations that re-run when inputs change.

Recalculation Engine