Imagine asking ChatGPT to watch a competitor, check a connected application and alert you only when something important changes. OpenAI has expanded Scheduled Tasks so users can create reminders, recurring work and monitoring routines that continue without an active conversation. A dedicated Scheduled page in the ChatGPT sidebar now provides one place to see active tasks and when each one will run next.
Tasks can be scheduled for a precise time or a broader window such as morning, afternoon or evening. Users can pause, resume, edit or delete them, while monitoring tasks can search the web and inspect connected apps for changes. Instead of delivering the same update every day, a task can be instructed to notify the user only when it finds something worth reporting.
Practical uses could include a daily industry briefing, a weekly review of public competitor announcements, a reminder built around a project deadline or a monitor for changes to a published policy. A business owner might track important market developments while an operations team watches a connected source for exceptions. The value comes from making the task specific enough that the notification prompts a useful decision rather than becoming another stream of noise.
There are clear limits. Tasks cannot run more than once each hour, active-task allowances vary by subscription and unattended routines may pause after a period of inactivity. The feature is rolling out to Plus, Pro, Business and Enterprise users rather than every ChatGPT account. Web results and connected-app data can also be incomplete or misunderstood, so high-impact decisions should never depend on an unattended notification without verification.
Scheduled Tasks moves ChatGPT from a tool that waits for a prompt towards a service that can monitor on a user’s behalf. Organisations should begin with low-risk routines, define exactly what counts as a meaningful change and review whether each alert produces value. Permissions to connected apps should remain as narrow as possible. Used carefully, scheduled monitoring can reduce repetitive checking and help people respond sooner, while keeping the final judgement and any consequential action in human hands.