What is a heartbeat agent?

The agent that wakes up on its own and gets to work.

Updated 2026-04-17
Short answer

A heartbeat agent is an AI agent that wakes on a schedule — hourly, daily, or event-driven — and runs a defined task without a human prompt. Heartbeats turn agents from reactive chatbots into proactive employees. They are the primitive that makes autonomous businesses possible, because most business value lives in recurring work, not one-off questions.

In depth

The heartbeat pattern was named in 2024 and became mainstream in 2025 through BCG's 'New Wave of Autonomous AI Agents' brief and Paperclip's open-source documentation. Before heartbeats, AI agents could only respond to human prompts — which meant they couldn't run a business, because a business runs on schedules (daily briefings, weekly reviews, monthly close, quarterly planning). A heartbeat has four parts: 1. A trigger (cron schedule, event listener, or external webhook). 2. A context refresh (pull current state from Notion, Postgres, Stripe, etc.). 3. A task execution (the agent does the work, writes outputs back, possibly escalates). 4. An audit trail (what ran, what was produced, what got flagged). Practical examples in a one-person company: - Daily 7am: Manager reads overnight metrics, drafts the founder brief. - Weekly Monday 9am: AI CMO reviews last week's content performance, proposes this week's calendar. - Monthly first-of-the-month: AI CFO closes books, generates P&L, flags anomalies. - Event-triggered: new customer signup → AI Support agent fires, sends onboarding sequence. Heartbeats are what separate 'AI tool' from 'AI employee.' A tool waits. An employee works. Implementation varies: - Paperclip has explicit heartbeat configuration per agent. - Polsia runs continuous autopilot (everything is a heartbeat). - Tycoon exposes heartbeats as scheduled tasks per role that can be paused, tuned, or audited. Best practice: every AI role should have at least one heartbeat. Roles without heartbeats never volunteer work and effectively operate as chatbots. The transition from 'AI helper' to 'AI teammate' is when heartbeats land.

Examples

  • Tycoon's 'Morning Brief' routine: every weekday 7am, Manager summarizes overnight activity in a 3-sentence message.
  • Polsia's continuous loop: the agent runs effectively non-stop, checking vendor APIs, posting ads, and responding to customer messages across 597 managed companies.
  • Paperclip's scheduled governance: heartbeat fires to audit agent budget consumption, flag over-spenders.
  • A newsletter writer's heartbeat: every Friday 4pm, AI Content agent drafts next Tuesday's newsletter based on the week's links, ready for founder review.
  • Claude Code's 'stop' hooks + GitHub Actions cron: effectively a heartbeat for developer-adjacent tasks.
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FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.

How is a heartbeat different from a cron job?

A cron job runs a fixed script. A heartbeat wakes an agent that uses judgment — it reads current context, decides what to do, and may choose to do nothing if context doesn't warrant action. A cron job that calls an LLM once is halfway there; true heartbeat agents have memory across runs, can escalate to humans, and learn from prior heartbeats. The distinction matters because cron jobs break when the world changes; heartbeat agents adapt.

What's the right frequency for a heartbeat?

Match the pace of the work. Customer support: every 15 minutes. Content review: daily. Financial close: monthly. The worst pattern is over-frequent heartbeats — they produce noise, burn tokens, and train the founder to ignore them. Tycoon's default scheduled tasks cluster into daily (most common), weekly (operational reviews), and monthly (strategic). You can promote or demote heartbeat frequency per role as the business matures.

Can heartbeats deadlock or spiral?

Yes — the most common failure is heartbeat A triggers heartbeat B which re-triggers A. Mature orchestration platforms (Tycoon, Paperclip) enforce DAG-style dependencies: heartbeats declare what they depend on, and the scheduler breaks cycles. Polsia's continuous loop trades this safety for speed; some customers report 'runaway agent' incidents as a result. Always test heartbeat chains in staging before enabling in production.

Which roles should have heartbeats?

Every role that owns recurring work. Manager (daily brief), AI CMO (content calendar review), AI COO (ops audit), AI CFO (monthly close), AI Support (inbox sweep). Roles that respond to ad-hoc requests (AI Researcher, AI Copywriter) may not need heartbeats — they wake on demand. Rule of thumb: if the role would have a standing meeting with the founder as a human, they need a heartbeat as an AI.

How does Tycoon implement heartbeats?

Each role can subscribe to scheduled heartbeats (hourly, daily, weekly, custom cron) that fire a check-in message to the role. The role decides what to do: post an update, flag something for the founder, trigger a downstream workflow, or do nothing. Heartbeats are the mechanism that lets the AI team run continuously between your direct conversations. You configure them per role in the autonomy settings.

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