Schedules, triggers and background work

Background jobs: hand it bulk work

For work too big for one reply ("reprice every SUV over 60 days old", "clean up the listings missing photos"), the AI can run a background job. Starting one is itself an approval card showing the job's name and exactly what it will do. Once you approve, the job runs on its own in segments, posting its progress back into the same chat.

A job never gets special powers: every change it wants to make goes through the same approval cards (or your Autopilot settings) as if you'd asked in chat. When a step needs your approval, the job pauses, you get a notification, and it continues automatically after you decide. If a card waits a week with no decision, the job stops and says so in your bell; the card itself stays in the chat. You'll get a notification when it finishes, and asking "how's my job going?" gives you the status any time.

If a run is interrupted after it may have saved or applied work, AutoDealer.io marks it as Needs review instead of repeating it automatically. Check the chat to see how far it got before you intentionally start it again.

Schedules: standing work on a clock

For work you want done on a rhythm rather than once ("every weekday at 7:30, check for leads nobody has touched and brief me"), create a schedule. Ask the AI for something recurring, or manage them under Settings → AI assistant → Schedules: pause, edit, delete, see each run's history, or hit Run now to try one immediately. Times are your dealership's local time.

A schedule is just a clock on the background-job machinery, so nothing changes about safety: each run's proposed changes still arrive as approval cards (or apply via your autopilot settings), and the run's briefing lands in your AI chat marked as an update so you can't miss it. Creating a schedule always needs an explicit approval, even with autopilot on: standing behavior is something you say yes to yourself. Schedules pause themselves and tell you why if their creator leaves the team or three runs in a row fail, and owners and managers can have up to ten.

A schedule also remembers what happened to its last runs. Each run starts with a few lines of notes, read from the schedule's own history at the moment it starts:

• How the last run ended: finished, with its one-line summary; stopped, with the reason; or still open.
• What you did with its cards: applied, applied on Autopilot, rejected (and why), undone, or still waiting. A card you decide after the run has ended still counts.
• What not to propose again: any change from the last three runs that you rejected as "not needed", or undid. The assistant leaves those alone unless you ask for them.

So a weekly brief can say what changed since last week, and a morning schedule won't propose again the price change you turned down yesterday. If you edit the schedule's instruction, the memory starts over. When a run read outside content (a customer's message, a bank line), its summary is left out of the next run's notes and only the facts about its cards carry over, so the caution doesn't follow the schedule forever.

Templated emails: the one way the assistant writes to a customer on its own

The assistant never sends free text to a customer. What it can send is a message template the owner or a manager wrote under Settings → Message templates: a subject and a plain-text body with a few placeholders ({{first_name}}, {{last_name}}, {{dealership_name}}, {{salesperson_name}}). {{salesperson_name}} is the salesperson the lead is assigned to; with nobody assigned, and on every message to a customer, it reads "the team at" and your dealership's name, so an email never goes out in the name of someone who did not see it. Only enabled templates count.

Ask for it the way you would ask a colleague ("send Jane the welcome email") and the assistant proposes Send "Welcome" to Jane Doe with the subject and message exactly as she will read them. Nothing on that card is editable; if the words need changing, change the template. At Ask me first the card waits for you, and at Do the routine it still waits. The assistant may send a template on its own only at Run it, or when the owner ticks "Communication: send templated" under Fine-tune.

A fifth stop applies to borrowers: a customer with a live in-house loan gets no templated message before 8 AM or after 9 PM in your dealership's timezone, whoever proposed it. Four more things stop a send before it is proposed and again before it goes out: the person wrote back and nobody answered (the assistant tells you to reply instead), they already received a templated message in the last day, the dealership has hit its daily limit of templated sends, or the template is not enabled. Every send lands on the person's timeline and in the platform's mail history, so one approval can never send twice. Each recipient's own unsubscribe still applies.

Triggers: work that starts when something happens

For work that should start the moment something happens rather than on a clock, the dealership owner can turn on triggers under Settings → AI assistant, in the Autopilot card's "Start work when something happens" section. Each trigger starts one background job when its event happens:

• A new lead comes in: every new lead counts, whether your team typed it in, a shopper sent a website form (a question, a pre-qualification, a trade-in or a test drive request), the storefront assistant took the shopper's details, or it arrived from a marketplace or an ADF feed. The assistant reads the lead and the car they asked about and proposes one first follow-up task for the salesperson, due within a business day. The AI lead handler is on for every plan, so the job loads that skill and runs its first-touch playbook instead (the welcome template card plus the task).
• An appointment is marked a no-show: it proposes one task to reach out and reschedule. The AI appointment concierge is on for every plan, so the job loads that skill and runs its no-show step instead (one reschedule offer as a card plus the task).
• Title work is kicked back by the state: it reads the title record and proposes the correcting step as a task for the person handling titles. The AI title and compliance runner is on for every plan, so the job loads that skill and runs its kick-back step instead.
• An in-house loan payment is returned (NSF): it reads the loan's standing and proposes one task for collections to contact the borrower. The AI BHPH collector is on for every plan, so the job loads that skill and runs its returned-payment step instead.
• A bank line has sat unreviewed for a week: the one trigger that watches for a condition rather than an event. Each morning the assistant checks the bank inbox for posted lines on your matching account that have sat unreviewed for seven days and, for each one (five a morning at most), starts a job that reads the line and the books and proposes one task for accounting to match or categorize it. Once the AI accountant is on for your plan, the job loads that skill and runs its bank inbox step instead. It needs a connected bank feed; with none, nothing happens.
• A new review arrives on your Google listing: also checked each morning, once a day. The assistant looks at your connected Google listing (Website settings) and, for each review that was not there at the last look (three a morning at most), starts a job that reads the latest reviews and proposes one task for you to answer the review on Google, with its stars and what it said in a few words. The AI marketing manager is on for every plan, so the job loads that skill and runs its reputation step instead. The assistant never writes or posts the public reply. Google shows only five reviews of its choosing and none without text, so when the review count rises with nothing new in view, one job says so and asks you to read them on Google. The first look after you turn it on only remembers what is already there. We keep no review text: only the review count and a fingerprint of each review already seen.

A trigger job runs as the assistant under the owner's standing permission, so the audit log shows it as "Assistant (for Jane Doe)" when Jane owns the dealership, never as a staffer who was not there. It follows the same dial as everything else: at Ask me first every task it prepares waits on an approval card; at Do the routine an eligible task may apply on its own, except in a job that started from words your team did not type. A new lead's name, a bank line's description and a review come from outside the dealership, so those jobs start the way a job does after reading outside content, and their cards always wait for a person. A trigger never contacts a customer or a borrower itself; the one exception is a templated email from the lead handler (a welcome) or the appointment concierge (a reschedule offer), which is still a card a person approves because the job read the person's own messages first. The same lead, appointment, title, payment, bank line or review starts at most one job, at most twenty trigger jobs start in a day, and a dealership that is stopped, at Answers only, or out of this month's AI budget starts none. Everything is off until the owner turns it on.

Related

• AI actions and approvals
• Autopilot and how much the assistant does alone