6.4.4. Scheduled and Event-Driven Tasks
💡 First Principle: Recurring work should run on a trigger, not on your memory. Cowork can run a task on a schedule (every weekday at 9 AM) or in response to an event (an email arrives, someone posts in a channel). Because nobody is watching when it fires, automated tasks default to drafting results for your approval rather than acting alone.
Scheduled tasks. Describe the schedule in a message ("Send me a daily briefing every morning at 9 AM"). When you activate a draft schedule, choose Activate and run now or Activate, where the first run happens at the next scheduled time. You can have up to 25 scheduled prompts in Cowork. Manage them on the Automations page, which has a Runs tab and a Manage schedules tab (edit, pause, resume, delete) plus a Create button, or in the side panel's Schedule section.
Event-driven tasks (added August 2026) fire when you receive an email, when a Teams channel message is posted, or when a Teams chat message arrives, optionally only when you're @mentioned. The Set up trigger? card shows When it fires, Run in (a new or the current session), What it does, and the permissions it needs. Automated task states are Active, Draft and Paused.
Guardrails on automation: automated tasks default to draft-and-approve, run with the creator's permissions, have rate limits and loop protection, and are recorded in the unified audit log.
Cowork vs Copilot Chat scheduling, side by side:
| Copilot Chat scheduled prompts (4.3) | Cowork scheduled and event-driven tasks | |
|---|---|---|
| Limit | Up to 10 | Up to 25 |
| Managed in | … Settings and more > Scheduled prompts | The Automations page or the side panel's Schedule section |
| Triggers | Time-based only | Time-based and event-based (email, channel message, chat message) |
| Results | A response in your Chats list | Multi-step work, drafted for your approval by default |
⚠️ Exam Trap: Event triggers exist only in Cowork. If a scenario asks for work that starts automatically "whenever a client emails" or "when someone @mentions me in the project channel," a Copilot Chat scheduled prompt can't do it. And mixing up the limits (10 for Chat, 25 for Cowork) is a classic distractor.
Reflection Question: A support lead wants a draft reply prepared automatically whenever a customer email arrives in her inbox, without anything being sent until she checks it. Which feature does this need, and which default behavior protects her?
