Triggers allow your Dust agents to run autonomously, without requiring manual invocation. Instead of waiting for you to ask a question, agents with triggers can wake up on their own schedule or respond to events from external systems.

Why Triggers Matter

Dust agents have always been excellent at answering questions when you ask them—searching your company knowledge, querying databases, analyzing documents on demand. Triggers complete the automation loop by giving agents the initiative to act without human prompting.

With triggers, you can build intelligent workflows that:

• Run automatically on a schedule you define
• React instantly to events in your connected tools
• Process information with full company context
• Write results back to your systems autonomously

The full automation loop becomes: trigger fires → agent processes with context → agent takes action in your tools. No manual intervention required.

Types of Triggers

Dust supports two types of triggers, each designed for different automation patterns.

Schedules

Schedule triggers run your agents at regular intervals that you define in natural language. Perfect for recurring workflows that need to happen at predictable times.

Common use cases:

• Daily pipeline reviews that run every morning at 8 AM
• Weekly metrics summaries generated every Friday afternoon
• Monthly compliance reports pulled on the first of each month

Learn more in the Schedules documentation.

Webhooks

Webhook triggers run your agents in response to events from external systems. When something happens in another platform—a ticket is created, a PR is opened, a deal changes stages—your agent can process it immediately with full company context.

Common use cases:

• Triaging support tickets the moment they arrive
• Reviewing pull requests when they're opened
• Enriching CRM records when deals move stages

Dust provides built-in webhook providers for popular platforms (GitHub, Jira, Zendesk, and more), plus support for custom webhooks from any system.

Learn more in the Webhooks documentation

How Triggers Work

When you create a trigger for an agent:

1. The trigger fires according to its schedule or when an external event occurs
2. A new conversation starts with your agent, optionally including event data from the webhook
3. The agent processes the request using its configured tools, data sources, and company knowledge
4. The agent can take action by writing to connected platforms through its tools

Every triggered execution creates a conversation you can review. You'll see what ran, when it ran, and what actions the agent took. This visibility ensures you maintain control and can audit any automated workflow.

Getting Started with Triggers

Triggers are available to all Dust users through the Agent Builder:

1. Open any agent in the Agent Builder
2. Navigate to the Triggers section
3. Choose whether to add a schedule or webhook trigger
4. Configure when and how the agent should run
5. Save your agent to activate the trigger

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Note

Triggers respect your existing workspace permissions and fair use limits. Only users with appropriate access can create and manage triggers for agents.

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Next steps:

• Set up a schedule for your agent
• Learn about webhook triggers
• Explore filtering webhook payloads