River Automations
Hire an AI agent. Schedule it like cron.
River Automations are background agents — recurring AI specialists with their own role, tools, model, and budget. The same intelligence as your chat, always on.
Schedule any AI agent.
Pick when, pick what. Schedule an agent to run weekly, daily, or every hour — a Monday morning triage of your sales pipeline, a Friday investor-update draft, a quarterly board prep. River dispatches a fresh specialist with the right context, tools, and budget, and reports back when it’s done.
Trigger on events.
New contact added? Research and draft an intro. New file uploaded? Tag, summarize, and route. New webhook from Stripe, GitHub, or your own service? Run the playbook. Event-driven automations wire your workspace together without the brittle hand-built scripts.
Specialists, not generalists.
When you create an Automation you define the role — what it does, the model that runs it, the tools it may call, the budget it can spend. The result is a safe, predictable specialist, not a giant chat that can do anything to anything.
Workflows for the deterministic stuff.
When the steps shouldn’t be left to an LLM, switch to a visual workflow. Real-time multiplayer canvas, deterministic nodes mixed with LLM calls, wait-for-approval pauses for the human in the loop, and full visibility into every run.
Why River Automations
Zapier wires apps. River automates the thinking.
Always on
Automations execute even when no River window is open. Server-side. Reliable. Logged with full reasoning traces.
Tightly scoped
Tight prompts, tight tool allowlists, tight budgets. Each agent is a focused expert — not an unbounded generalist.
Auditable
Every run is an entity. Inputs, outputs, intermediate reasoning, cost — all replayable and inspectable forever.
For everyone with recurring work
A staff for every kind of life.
Companies
A growth team without a growth hire. Finance ops without finance ops. Every recurring task at your company can be an Automation — and they all run while you focus on the work only you can do.
Students
Schedule literature search before class. Auto-generate flashcards from new readings. Get a five-minute prep brief on today’s topic. Every recurring chore in school becomes a one-time setup.
Personal
A nightly inbox closer. A monthly bills tracker. A Friday weekend planner that emails you three options based on the weather and your free time. Tiny automations, real quality of life.
Questions
Claude (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), GPT-5, Gemini, and Grok at the top end; smaller open-source models for cheap recurring chores. You pick per-Automation based on the task.
Every Automation has a maximum number of tool calls and a maximum runtime per execution. River cancels and reports if a run hits either limit, so a stuck agent can’t empty your account.
Yes. Use the HTTP node in a Workflow to call any endpoint, or wire a custom MCP integration to expose your service as a tool the agent can plan against.
Every run produces a Job entity with the full reasoning trace, inputs, outputs, and cost. Open it like any other doc, replay it, or roll back the side effects.
Yes. Drop a wait-for-approval node into a Workflow, or set an Automation’s output to queue for review. The run pauses until you approve, edit, or reject.
Zapier wires API calls. River runs actual reasoning. An Automation reads context, makes a decision, drafts content, and acts — and you can chain that to deterministic steps when you need them.
Stop doing what an AI should be doing for you.
Pick a trigger, pick a model, define the role. River handles execution, retries, logging, and escalation. You get the result.