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Background tasks

You can ask your AI to do things later instead of right now: remind you in two hours, send a summary every morning, or hand a long job to the background and report back. These are background tasks — jobs the AI runs without you having to keep the chat open. Background tasks are reliable by design:
  • They survive restarts. If the service your AI runs on restarts mid-job, the job is picked up and finished, not thrown away.
  • They retry themselves. A job that fails halfway (a flaky network, a busy service) is tried again automatically.
  • They run quietly. Recurring jobs normally send you just a short summary, or nothing at all if there is nothing to say.

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What you can ask for

  • One-off reminders — “Remind me in 20 minutes to check the oven”, “Remind me at 4pm to call the bank.”
  • Recurring jobs — “Every weekday at 9am, summarise overnight emails”, “Every Monday, draft a weekly plan.”
  • Background work — “Work on this research in the background and tell me when it’s done.”
See Reminders and schedules for concrete phrasings and where results get delivered.

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Ask for a reminder

1

Send the request in chat

Ask naturally: “Remind me in two hours to follow up on the build.” You can also name a clock time (“at 4pm”) or a timezone (“at 9am London time”).What you should see: the AI confirms the reminder is set, usually repeating the time back to you.
2

Wait for it to fire

At the time you asked for, the AI starts a fresh job and carries it out.What you should see: the reminder (or its result) arrives in the chat where you asked for it — or in the place you agreed on (“send the summary to the team channel”).
3

Change or cancel it

Reply in chat: “Actually, move that reminder to 5pm” or “Cancel the morning summary.” One-off reminders tidy themselves away after they fire, so there is nothing to clean up.What you should see: the AI confirms the change or cancellation.
Be specific about when and where: “Every weekday at 9am, summarise my inbox and send it here.” Vague timing (“sometime tomorrow morning”) works less reliably than an exact time.

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What happens if things go wrong

Background jobs are retried automatically when they fail. A job is only parked permanently when it has used up its retries or has been stuck for roughly 25 minutes — that is rare and usually means whatever the job depends on (a website, a service, a file) was down for a long time. If a job you expected never finished:
  1. Wait a few minutes — the retry happens quietly in the background.
  2. Ask the AI in chat: “Did the morning summary run today?”
  3. If it still has not appeared, ask whoever runs your AI to check the task history — they have a screen for exactly that, and your report helps them find the stuck job.
If the service your AI runs on was restarted or updated while a job was in progress, the job resumes automatically. Reminders and schedules you set up before an update keep working — you do not need to recreate them.