Productive AI Agents are autonomous AI workers that can perform tasks inside Productive on your behalf without you needing to be present or prompt them manually.
While the AI Assistant responds when you ask it something, Agents work proactively. They can be set up to run on a schedule, respond to triggers, and take real actions inside your account like creating tasks, updating records, or following up on items, all based on rules you define.
Think of the AI Assistant as a colleague you ask questions. Agents are more like a team member you delegate a recurring workflow to.
AI Agents are available on the Ultimate subscription plan.
How Are Agents Different From the AI Assistant?
Agents are purpose-built AI workers that act autonomously on your behalf — fine-tuned for specific tasks and able to run without you once set up.
Besides Agents, Productive also offers two other ways to automate and assist your work: the AI Assistant, a generalist you prompt on demand, and Automations, rule-based workflows that fire when conditions are met without any AI involved.
| AI Assistant | Agents | Automations |
Started by | You — manually, every time | A trigger, or you via "Talk to Agent" | An event or schedule — fully automatic |
How it runs | You open it, type a prompt, it responds | Automatically in the background, or on demand | When a condition is met, a defined action fires |
What it does | Generates content, answers questions, creates and updates things on request | Takes actions inside Productive — fine-tuned for a specific task | Moves tasks, sends notifications, updates fields — based on rules you define |
Best for | Ad-hoc tasks, drafting, quick lookups | Recurring AI tasks tied to your data | Predictable, repeatable rule-based tasks |
What Can Agents Do?
Agents can access most areas of Productive depending on their permission set — from tasks and projects to reporting, finance, and people management. What a specific Agent can do is determined by the permissions assigned to it.
👉 See examples of Agents in action in Working With AI Agents.
Enabling AI Agents
Agents require Productive AI to be enabled by an admin.
To enable Productive AI:
Go to Settings > Productive AI
Toggle Turn on AI
Once enabled, Agents and other AI features become available.
By default, only users with the Admin or Manager (including all Manager variants) permission set can create and manage Agents. Other users can view and interact with them.
If your organization uses custom permission sets, enable the following permissions to grant access to Agents:
View AI agents - Allows the user to see Agents in Resourcing > Agents.
Add, edit, and delete AI agents - Allows the user to create and manage Agents.
Where to Go From Here
👉 Setting Up and Managing AI Agents walks you through creating and configuring your first Agent.
👉 When you're done, check out Working With AI Agents for practical guidance on using it day-to-day, including example Agents to help you get started.