The Execution type decides what starts your Agent. It matters for the result as much as for the timing, because it changes what the Agent knows when it wakes up — and your instructions have to match.
Not every agent type supports all three options. The Execution type dropdown only lists the ones available for the type you chose.
The Agent runs only when you ask it to, from the Crono chat.
Open the record you want to work on, such as a contact or a company.
Open the chat on the left and select your Agent in the chat's Agent bar. Hover over an avatar to see its name.
Type what you want — for example, Qualify this contact — and send.
The Agent starts one execution and you follow it in the chat. Run this way, it can also see the page you have open, so you can refer to what is on screen.
Good for: on-demand work, and for testing a new Agent on a handful of records before you automate it.
Every Agent can be used this way, whatever its execution type. A Scheduled or Trigger-based Agent can still be started by hand from the chat.
The Agent runs by itself on a fixed rhythm, for each associated user.
Choose Scheduled as the execution type.
Pick a Run timing: Morning, Afternoon or Evening. These are indicative start times — around 9:00, 14:00 and 18:00.
Pick a Frequency: Daily, Weekly or Monthly.
For Weekly, pick the Day of the week. For Monthly, pick the Day of the month; if a month is shorter, it runs on the last day.
The timing follows each associated user's own time zone, not the creator's — so a Monday-morning Agent starts in the morning for every person it is assigned to, at a different moment for each. Daylight saving is not taken into account: the time comes from the fixed time-zone setting on each profile, so the run can shift by an hour when the clocks change.
Good for: recurring passes over a set of records — a daily review of yesterday's new contacts, or a weekly clean-up.
Important: a scheduled run has no record attached and nobody at the keyboard. The Agent has to find the records itself, so your instructions must say exactly which ones to work on — see How to write effective instructions for your Agent.
The Agent runs automatically each time something happens in Crono.
Choose Trigger-based as the execution type.
In Select trigger, pick the object: Contact, Company, Deal or Events. On Salesforce workspaces, Lead is also available.
For an object, pick Created or Updated in Select type. For Updated, pick the field to watch in Select property, and optionally the values that should fire it — leave it on Any value to fire on every change.
For Events, pick one event from the list. These cover sequence events (contact enrolled, contact replied, sequence completed), signals (role change, company change, website visit, interested open, interested click, hiring signal) and notifications (email replied, opened or clicked, LinkedIn replied, invitation accepted, InMail replied, voice note replied).
The Agent fires once for the person who owns the record the event happened on — and only if that person owns the Agent or is one of its associated users.
Good for: reacting the moment something changes, without anyone watching.
Prerequisite: Trigger-based Agents require Webhooks to be enabled for your workspace — see Webhooks in Crono.
Important: the event has already happened when the Agent starts. It receives the record and nothing else, so write the instructions as work to do on that record, not as a condition to check.
