Introducing Tasks

tl;dr: Schedule prompts for the Hex Agent to run automatically and deliver answers straight to you in Slack or email.

For years, dashboards were how teams stayed on top of recurring questions about the business. But they were always a static asset, they showed you what you built, not what you needed to know. When we released the Hex agent, getting an answer became as easy as asking. Turns out the questions didn’t slow down, they multiplied.

Customers kept returning to the same questions every week because the answers kept changing, and a follow-up was as easy as just asking the agent again.

Tasks is the next step — the consistency of a dashboard with the reasoning of an agent. It runs on your schedule, delivers answers directly to you and can learn from previous runs so you can see how things are changing over time.

What you can do with it

Here are a few examples of how our team is using it.

Get a daily briefing before you start the day

Our CEO’s favorite use of Tasks? A daily briefing on the company metrics he cares about most.

Just ask the agent to create one on your behalf. You can tag in dashboards, or other assets you want the agent to use. And because the agent can reference previous runs, the briefing doesn’t just show the current state, but can show major changes or shifts from previous weeks.

When results are sent to you, you can reply directly in the Slack thread to ask follow up questions, so you’re prepped for the day before you arrive at the office.

Proactively catch metric drops

It’s too easy to miss a metric slowly dipping over a few days or even a week. But now with Tasks, the Hex agent can catch it first.

Set up a task to run every morning on your key funnel metrics and ask the agent to proactively investigate anything that looks off or unexpected. The agent can send a daily update in a shared channel with a root cause analysis and action items for your team.

Get the latest on every key account

The Hex agent can go beyond your warehouse to build a complete picture of every account. Our sales team uses tasks to run weekly updates across their key accounts. It combines governed context like usage trends, feature adoption with unstructured context like meeting notes in Notion or recent news from the web.

Want more prompt templates and worked examples? Check out the Tasks cookbook →

Getting started

A few tips from our team:

• Start from the Hex Agent, it can help you draft a comprehensive prompt, plus you’ll have a sense of what the response will look like
• Be detailed on what you want the output to look like: charts, a brief summary, bullet points over paragraphs?
• Test the run before setting up the schedule that way you can tweak the prompt to fine-tune the results

Start with one question your team answers manually every week, get it running, and you’ll find a second one pretty quickly. We can’t wait to hear what you think!