Last month I fixed a problem I'd had for years, and it was easier than I expected.
It's a research task that runs once a week. It goes out, finds what's new on a topic I care about, and writes it down in one place. That's the whole thing.
Here's why it stuck with me.
There's a topic I've been researching for a few years now. I go back to it every two or three months, and every time I do it's stale. So I lose most of a day catching up before I can even start thinking.
Now it's fifteen minutes a week.
Same information, a fraction of the time. And the reason isn't that AI did the research for me. It's that nothing got outdated.
The second thing I didn't expect is that it filters. Most people stay current by reading everything, and everything is mostly somebody else deciding what you should pay attention to. A scheduled task only looks for what I told it to look for. It doesn't show me anything else.
Almost nobody is doing this. Gallup says 52% of US workers now use AI in their role, but only 15% use it daily. If you're not in it every day, you almost certainly don't have anything running without you.
Which is strange, when you think about it. We are all getting pitched agents that will run the company, while nothing at all is watching the one thing you keep meaning to check.
The feature I've been using is called Scheduled Tasks, inside Claude. It works on any paid plan, and you set one up by describing what you want and picking how often it should run. It runs whether your laptop is open or not.
Research is just where I landed. Our team has them running for meeting notes and for sorting which emails actually need a reply. None of it is complicated. It's all just things somebody was doing by hand until they weren't.
So pick that thing. The competitor you look at once a quarter or maybe the numbers you go pull when somebody asks.
Below you'll find our guide to setting one up, plus the resources we've been using ourselves.
Registration is open, and we'll send the recording if you can't make it live.
Claude: Scheduled Tasks, inside Cowork. Any paid plan. Set one up →
ChatGPT: Scheduled, in the sidebar. Plus and above. Set one up →
Grok: Automations. Launched in July, schedule or email triggered. See what it does →
Don't overthink the first one. These are the ones worth having running before you get clever.
Sort your inbox before you open it.
Every weekday morning, triage what came in overnight into reply, schedule, task, archive. Our email and calendar guide walks through the whole setup, and the last step offers to turn it into a scheduled task for you.
Set up your AI coworker →Check for new reviews every Monday.
Have it pull anything new across Google, Yelp and Facebook and draft the replies. Our review kit has the prompts and the list of reviews you shouldn't answer at all.
Respond to every review →Watch one competitor's pricing page.
Pricing moves before anything gets announced, and it's a change nobody sends a press release about.
Pull the one number you look up by hand.
Whatever you go and find when somebody asks. If you're checking it more than once a month, have it come to you instead.
The pattern in all four: one specific thing, from one specific place. "Industry news" is not a thing you can point a task at.
Microsoft surveyed 20,000 people using AI at work this spring. The number of active agents running inside Microsoft 365 grew fifteen times year over year, and eighteen times at large companies. Their conclusion about what that does to the people in charge: the more agents execute, the higher the stakes on human evaluation. They put three questions to anyone running them:
- Who reviews agent performance?
- Who is allowed to change what the agents do?
- How does one person's fix reach everybody else?
Our Take: You don't need a title or a platform for this. If you have one scheduled task running, you're already the answer to all three questions. So once a month, open five recent runs and read them properly. Ask whether you'd have written the same thing yourself. If two of the five are off then rewrite the instructions.
Source: Microsoft 2026 Work Trend Index
We built a page that does the hard part for you. Pick what you want to keep an eye on, pick how often, and it writes the instructions you can paste straight into Claude. Plus the cadence we'd recommend and what to look at after a month.
Build Your First Scheduled Task →If you set up a Scheduled Task, tell us what you made. We'll share the best ones!
— Brian, Murphy, John, Beth, and Jake. Some of the humans behind AI Front Desk.
Your team can't be everywhere. Your AI can.
Every missed lead, unanswered inquiry, and unsaved cancellation is revenue walking out the door. AI Front Desk works alongside your team to make sure the work gets done - every lead, every hour, every day.