An always-on agent is a program that keeps a goal, watches a clock or a stream of events, and acts without being asked each time. In 2026 the big labs started selling them as products. You can also run one yourself for free, on almost any computer. This series covers all three: what they are, who makes them, and how I set mine up.
Understand
Start here if you have only seen the headlines. I define the term the way I use it, keep a running list of who ships what, and say what it all costs.
Same use cases, free tools
Each of these rebuilds one launch demo from a big vendor with free software, so you can judge the real thing against something you own.
Set it up anywhere
Twelve guides that share one ten-step spine. Each page covers only what is different on that system, and I tested the commands on a fresh install before publishing.
Open source and free
The projects I would actually run, the free models that can hold a tool loop together, and the workflow tools that were always-on before the word existed.
In real life
What people run agents for, where they fit in a marketing team, and the honest account of how my own company runs on them.
Who is shipping what
The short version of the rolling headlines post, which goes up on October 21, 2026, which I update as announcements land. Dates are the primary announcement, not the press cycle.
| Company | Product | What it does when nobody is typing | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| OpenAI | dots | Takes on an ongoing job from inside ChatGPT, on its own cloud computer | 29 Sep 2026 |
| Meta | Muse | A personal agent for long-running tasks, on a dedicated virtual machine | 8 Sep 2026 |
| Gemini Spark | Keeps working on Google Cloud after your laptop closes | 19 May 2026 | |
| Microsoft | Autopilot (was Scout) | Acts across Microsoft 365 under its own identity | 2 Jun 2026 |
| Anthropic | Managed Agents, Claude Code scheduled tasks | Agents that run on a schedule or on an event, hosted | Apr to Jun 2026 |
| Salesforce | Agentforce | Pursues sales goals across days and weeks with memory | 11 Sep 2026 |
| Workday | Autopilot Agents | Carries out HR, finance and IT work, not just answers | 13 Oct 2026 |
| ServiceNow | Project Arc | A desktop agent that executes across enterprise tools | 5 May 2026 |
| OpenClaw | OpenClaw | Open source, MIT; the self-hosted favourite, often on a Mac mini | 2026 |
| Nous Research | Hermes Agent | Open source, MIT, learns skills from its own past work | Feb 2026 |
Words you will see
- Always-on agent
- A program with a goal that keeps running, watches for triggers and acts without a fresh prompt. Persistence is the defining property, not literal 24/7 compute.
- Background agent
- The same idea, named for where it runs: out of sight, while you do something else.
- dot
- OpenAI’s name for one always-on agent inside ChatGPT.
- Scheduled task
- Anthropic’s name for a saved Claude Code job that runs in its cloud on a schedule, an API call or a GitHub event. It was called a routine until recently, and the web address still says so.
- Gateway
- The long-lived process in OpenClaw and Hermes Agent that holds the connection to your chat apps and runs scheduled jobs.
- Heartbeat
- A periodic check-in the agent sends so you know it is alive. Silence is the alarm.
- cron
- The classic Unix scheduler: run this command at these times.
- Daemon
- A program that runs in the background with no window, started by the system.
- systemd
- The service manager on most Linux systems. It starts your agent at boot and restarts it when it dies.
- launchd
- The macOS equivalent of systemd. Our publishing agents run under it.
- Task Scheduler
- The Windows equivalent, usually used to start WSL, which then runs systemd.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol, the open standard that lets an agent reach tools and data sources.
- Local model
- A language model running on your own hardware, through a tool like Ollama, so there is no API bill.