Productive gives you three ways to automate and assist your work, and each is built for a different job.
This article breaks down how each one starts, how it runs, and what it's best suited for, so you can pick the right one, or combine them.
Comparing the Three
| 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 |
Involves AI | Yes | Yes | No |
AI Assistant
The AI Assistant is a generalist you prompt on demand. Think of it as a colleague you ask questions: it responds when you open it and type something, and it doesn't act on its own.
đ See Productive's AI Assistant.
Agents
Agents are purpose-built AI workers, fine-tuned for a specific task and able to run without you once set up. They can be triggered by a schedule, an action in Productive, or a mention in Slack, and they take real actions inside your account based on rules you define.
đ See AI Agents: Overview.
Automations
Automations are rule-based: When â Check if â Then. No AI is involved: they fire exactly the way you configure them, every time.
đ See Automations: General Overview.
Using Them Together
These aren't mutually exclusive. An Automation's Then step can start an Agent, so you can combine rule-based triggers with AI-driven action.
For example, a Slack message trigger can launch an Agent to handle what comes next, instead of (or alongside) a simpler action like creating a task.
đ See Setting Up Triggers for AI Agents for how Agent triggers are built.