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Automations Overview

Published February 27, 2026 · Last updated March 7, 2026 · 5 min read

Automations in Obvious let you turn recurring work into workflows that run on their own. Instead of repeating the same requests manually — pulling reports, checking data quality, syncing information — you define the steps once and let Obvious handle the execution on a schedule or in response to an event.

Three building blocks make this possible: tasks, schedules, and webhooks. Tasks define what to do. Schedules define when to do it. Webhooks define what triggers it from outside Obvious.

Tasks

A task is a saved, reusable workflow. It captures a sequence of steps that an agent follows every time the task runs — checking a data source, transforming records, generating a report, sending a notification, or any combination of work you'd otherwise do by hand.

Think of a task as a set of instructions you write once. Each step describes what the agent should do in plain language, and Obvious executes them in order. The agent brings the same capabilities it has in a normal conversation — searching the web, querying data, writing documents, calling APIs — but now those capabilities run automatically.

Tasks live at the project level. Every project can have its own set of tasks, visible in the Tasks panel on the right sidebar (Ctrl+Shift+K opens it). You can run any task on demand, attach a schedule to it, or wire it to a webhook.

Creating a task happens naturally in conversation. Describe the workflow you want, and the agent builds the task for you — naming it, structuring the steps, and saving it. You can also create tasks manually through the Tasks panel by clicking + New Task, naming it, and adding steps one at a time.

Schedules

A schedule attaches a recurring timer to a task. You define the frequency — daily at 9am, every Monday and Friday, the first of each month — and Obvious runs the task automatically at those times.

Scheduled tasks run without any interaction from you. The agent picks up the task, executes each step, and logs the results. If something goes wrong (a rate limit, a missing credential, a data issue), the agent retries automatically before flagging the problem.

Schedules use standard recurrence patterns. You can set them up with natural language when creating the task — "run this every weekday at 8:30am Eastern" — or configure them manually with the schedule picker in the task editor. Every schedule includes a timezone, so "9am" means 9am in the timezone you choose.

Common patterns include daily data quality checks, weekly report generation, Monday-morning pipeline summaries, and monthly metric snapshots. The schedule runs whether you're logged in or not.

Webhooks

Webhooks let external services trigger tasks in Obvious. When something happens outside your workspace — a support ticket is created, a form is submitted, a payment is processed, a message arrives in Slack — the external service sends a notification to Obvious, and Obvious responds by running the associated task.

Setting up a webhook creates a unique URL. You paste that URL into the external service's webhook configuration (Stripe, Slack, GitHub, Pylon, or any service that supports webhooks), and the connection is live. When the external service fires an event, Obvious receives it and kicks off the task.

Webhooks support three action types. Task trigger matches an incoming event to a saved task and runs it. Prompt renders a template with the webhook payload and sends it to an agent — useful for dynamic responses that don't follow a fixed task structure. Shell command runs a command in the sandbox with the payload available as an environment variable — useful for developers who want precise control over what happens.

Each webhook subscription tracks its event count, last event time, and error rate. You can pause a subscription without deleting it, which is useful for debugging or temporarily disabling a workflow.

How They Work Together

The real power of automations comes from combining these pieces. A schedule triggers a task every morning that checks your CRM for at-risk accounts. A webhook fires when a new support ticket arrives, and the triggered task enriches it with customer data before routing it. A scheduled task generates a weekly summary document and posts a link to Slack.

Each automation runs in its own thread, so you can see exactly what the agent did, review the results, and adjust the steps if something needs to change. The thread history serves as a complete audit trail of every automated run.

Monitoring Automations

The Tasks panel shows all tasks in your project, along with their schedule status and last run time. Running tasks appear in the activity panel with a live progress indicator. If a scheduled task fails, Obvious logs the failure and surfaces it the next time you open the project.

For webhook-triggered workflows, each subscription shows its event count, error count, and last event timestamp — enough to tell at a glance whether the integration is healthy.

Next Steps

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