The agent that wakes up on its own and gets to work.
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.
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.
Clear answers about wallet credit, usage, subscriptions, and how Tycoon charges for work.
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.
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.
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.
Every role that owns recurring work. AI CEO (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.
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.