Grok Automations: Scheduled and Email-Triggered Jobs
On July 16, 2026, Grok started doing work nobody asked it to do in the moment. Automations let you describe a job once and have Grok run it on a schedule — or fire it when an email arrives that matches your filters. They’re live on grok.com and in the iOS and Android apps.
This is a bigger deal than the Office add-ins that got more coverage the following week, because it’s the first time one of the major assistants reacts to something happening rather than to a clock or a person. It’s worth understanding precisely, including where the line actually falls.
How an automation is built
An automation’s instructions read like a chat message. Describe what you want, attach files for context, add connectors and skills, pick a mode, name it, save it. From then on every run is a fresh request: same instructions, current data.
You can also skip the builder entirely and create one from chat — ask Grok to “check the news every morning and flag anything about pricing” and it sets the automation up for you. The Automations page ships suggested templates too, and anything can be paused, resumed, edited, or deleted.
One detail that matters for reliability: instructions can point at tools directly. Type @ to mention a connector and Grok uses it on every run, rather than deciding each time whether the question sounds relevant to that service.
The two trigger types
Schedules. Once, daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, or yearly, at a time in your timezone. A morning brief at 8:00. A rent reminder on the 1st.
Email triggers. These watch your inbox. When an incoming message matches your filters — sender, recipient, or subject — the automation fires with that email as context, and Grok responds to the actual message rather than to a generic instruction.
Those three fields are the entire matching vocabulary. Not body content, not attachments, not labels.
There’s also Run now for testing an automation immediately after building it, which is more useful than it sounds — the alternative is waiting until tomorrow morning to find out your morning brief prompt was ambiguous.
What a run looks like
When an automation fires, Grok opens a real conversation, does the work, and saves the result to run history. You can open any run to read the full thread, or pick the conversation up where Grok left off — which is the design decision that makes this feel like a colleague’s work product rather than a log line.
Reporting is per-automation: email, app notification, both, or neither if you’d rather check the history yourself.
What it costs
Scheduled automations are available to everyone. Email triggers are included with SuperGrok.
That’s a clean split and a defensible one — the schedule is the commodity, the trigger is the product. It also means the capability people will actually notice is behind the paid tier.
What this changes about AI assistants
Until this shipped, the dividing line between chat assistants and automation tools was simple: assistants waited to be opened. That stopped being true through 2026 in stages — ChatGPT rebuilt Scheduled Tasks, Claude shipped scheduled work in Cowork — but all of it was still the clock.
Grok is the first to fire on an event. It’s worth stating the scope carefully, because it’s easy to overstate in both directions.
Since July 2026 Grok can start work on its own two ways: a schedule, or an incoming email that matches your filters. Email is the only event it watches. The connectors it has to Salesforce, Teams, SharePoint, and the rest never fire anything — they wait to be asked inside a conversation.
The precise gap: Grok has connectors to Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, GitHub, Linear, Notion, Box, Vercel and more — and not one of them can start an automation. They answer questions inside a conversation. The only thing in the entire Grok surface area that fires anything is an inbound email matching sender, recipient, or subject.
So Grok can react to the notification. It can’t react to the thing the notification is about.
That distinction sounds pedantic until you list what generates the notifications: a deal moving to closed-won, a form submission, an invoice going overdue, a support ticket escalating, a file landing in a shared folder, a calendar invite being moved. Every one of those produces an email eventually, from some system, in some format, if someone configured it to. Grok’s trigger is downstream of all of them, and inherits whatever delay and whatever gaps that notification pipeline has.
What to actually use it for
The honest, useful list — cases where the trigger genuinely is time or mail:
- A morning brief at 8:00 pulling calendar conflicts and the emails worth replying to
- Watching for mail from a specific client or domain and summarizing it the moment it lands
- A weekly research sweep on competitors, delivered Monday
- Monthly recurring reminders tied to a date rather than an event
- Triaging a noisy alerting mailbox by subject pattern
That’s a real product and worth the SuperGrok tier if inbox latency is your bottleneck.
Where it won’t reach: anything that starts in a system rather than an inbox, anything that needs to match on message body or attachment, and anything where the automation needs to act across several apps in sequence in response to a change in one of them.
Triggers on everything else
Carly is built around the trigger Grok doesn’t have. Agents fire on events across 200+ integrations — a CRM record changing, a form arriving, a payment failing, a file landing, a calendar event moving — rather than on a schedule or an inbox match. Anything with a public API that isn’t already native connects with your own key.
The interface is the other difference. Each agent gets its own name and email address, so you brief it and delegate to it the way you would a colleague — forward it a thread, cc it on a request — instead of building a job in a console. Free, unlimited Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month.
If your automations genuinely are “every morning” and “when this client emails,” Grok now covers that well and you should use it. The reason to look further is if the sentence you keep wanting to write starts with “when this happens in” and the next word isn’t “my inbox.”
FAQ
Are Grok Automations free?
Scheduled automations are available to all users. Email triggers require SuperGrok.
What can an email trigger match on?
Sender, recipient, or subject. When a message matches, the automation fires with that email as context and Grok responds to the actual message. Body content and attachments aren’t part of the filter set.
Can an automation be triggered by something other than email?
No. Email is the only event type. Everything else runs on a schedule — once, daily, weekdays, weekly, monthly, or yearly — or on demand with Run now.
Can automations use my connectors?
Yes. Add connectors and skills when you build the automation, and mention a connector with @ in the instructions to have Grok use it on every run.
How do I see what an automation did?
Every run saves to the automation’s run history as a full conversation. Open any run to read the thread, or continue it. You can also have each automation report by email, app notification, both, or neither.
Where do I create one?
At grok.com/automations, from the iOS or Android app, or by asking Grok in chat to set one up for you.
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