Most ChatGPT users have been treating it like a search engine: you go to it, you ask something, you get an answer. Today's update quietly shifts that relationship. ChatGPT can now work for you in the background, at times you choose, without you having to show up.
Here is how it works in plain terms. You type something like "every Monday morning, give me a summary of news in the steel industry" or "remind me every Friday at 4pm to check on the Miller project." ChatGPT confirms the task, stores it, and runs it on schedule. You get a push notification or email when it is done. You do not need to be logged in or even have your phone in hand.
The tasks run whether you are online or not. They support one-time or repeating schedules, and you can set them for a specific time or a looser window like "morning" or "evening." There is also a monitoring mode: you can ask ChatGPT to watch for something, such as a change in a supplier's pricing page or news about a specific company, and it will only alert you when something actually changes.
The new Scheduled page in the sidebar is essentially a dashboard for all of this. You can see what tasks are active, when they will next run, and edit or pause any of them without having to dig through settings.
There is a cap: you can have up to 10 active tasks at a time. That is enough for most people, but if you are running a lot of recurring workflows, you will need to be deliberate about which ones you keep active. Tasks cannot run more than once per hour, and ones left inactive for a long time may pause automatically.
OpenAI is also shutting down Pulse, a feature it launched late last year for Pro subscribers. Pulse was an automatic daily briefing that pulled from your chat history, memory, and connected apps like Gmail and Google Calendar, then delivered a set of visual summary cards each morning. It was genuinely useful for people who set it up. Pro users have 14 days left before it disappears. After that, you can recreate the same experience by scheduling a daily briefing task and asking ChatGPT to draw on your interests and past conversations.
The free tier does not get any of this. Scheduled tasks are a paid feature across Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans. There is no indication yet of when or whether free users will get access.
The practical use cases are straightforward. A procurement manager could schedule a weekly check on commodity prices. An operations director could get a Monday morning briefing on any news touching their key suppliers. A back-office team lead could set a Friday afternoon prompt to draft a status update for their manager. None of this requires technical setup. If you can describe what you want in a sentence, you can schedule it.
The reliability of this feature has historically been inconsistent in earlier versions. OpenAI says tasks are now faster and more reliable, but it is worth testing with low-stakes tasks first before building any real workflow dependency on it.