Automate your advertising with Agent Routines

Until now, the Autron AI Agent has worked on demand — you ask a question or request a change in chat (or through the MCP connector in Claude or ChatGPT), and the agent does it while you watch. Routines flip that around. A routine is a saved prompt that the agent runs automatically and unattended — on a recurring schedule, or whenever an external system fires a webhook — against one of your sellers.

That's the leap: a daily bid sweep that runs at 7am before you're awake, a weekly negative‑keyword harvest every Monday, or a new‑product campaign that launches itself the moment your inventory system says a SKU went live. You set it up once; it runs on its own.

How routines differ from chatting with the agent

When you chat with the agent — or connect it to Claude or ChatGPT through the MCP server — you're in the loop for every change. The agent proposes, you click Approve, and only then does it touch your Amazon Ads account.

A routine runs with no one watching, so it works differently:

• Destructive Amazon Ads writes are pre‑approved. There's no Approve / Deny card during a routine run, because there's no human there to click it. Creating the routine is your authorization — you're telling the agent, in advance, exactly what it's allowed to do on each run.
• Every action is still audited. Pre‑approved doesn't mean invisible. Every campaign, bid, budget, or target change a routine makes is recorded in the same Action log as your interactive changes, with full detail.
• Each run is a full chat transcript. A routine run is a real, headless agent conversation. You can open any run and read exactly what the agent looked at, what it decided, and every tool it called — just like scrolling back through a chat.

Creating a routine

Open Routines from the agent's sidebar, then click New routine. A routine has five parts.

1. Name

Whatever helps you recognise it in the list — "Daily bid sweep", "Weekly negative harvest", "Launch campaign on new SKU".

2. Active toggle

A single switch controls whether the routine is live. Active means scheduled triggers fire and webhooks run; Paused means everything is held — scheduled fires are skipped and the routine sits idle until you flip it back. (You can also pause/resume from the routine's row menu on the list page.)

3. Triggers

What makes the routine run. You can add a Scheduled trigger, a Webhook trigger, or both. These are covered in detail in the Triggers section below.

4. Agent Instructions

The prompt the agent runs on every fire — the heart of the routine. It's the same kind of instruction you'd type into a chat, except it has to stand entirely on its own, because no one will be there to answer follow‑up questions. A small model picker in the corner of the instructions box chooses which model runs the routine.

You can dictate these instructions rather than type them — press the microphone in the instructions box, or Option+V. See Dictating messages to the Autron Agent.

5. Channels

Where each run's results are delivered. Every routine records in-app, and you can add one or more delivery channels on top:

• In‑app (always on) — every run is recorded as a transcript you can open in the agent. This can't be turned off.
• Email digest (optional) — after every meaningful run, Autron emails a tidy summary of what the run found, with a link to open the full conversation. The digest is conversational — recipients can simply reply to the email to ask the agent follow-up questions about the run, and it answers in the same thread (changes to your account still require your approval in the app). Add it from Add channel → Email digest.
• Slack (optional) — post the same digest to a Slack channel. Connect your workspace once from Settings → Integrations (“Add to Slack”), then add it with Add channel → Slack channel and pick the channel. See Connecting Slack to Autron for the full walkthrough.
• Custom webhook (optional, for developers) — Autron POSTs a signed JSON summary of each meaningful run to an HTTPS endpoint you control, so you can pipe results into your own systems. Add it with Add channel → Custom webhook. A per-channel signing secret is shown once at creation (verify requests with the X-Autron-Signature header); it can be rotated but never re-displayed.

When you add the Email digest, the recipient list is pre‑filled with your company's team members; add or remove any address — a teammate, a shared inbox, yourself. Send test email delivers a sample to everyone on the list so you can see exactly what lands before the first real run. The Slack and webhook channels each have their own send-test action too.

Triggers

Scheduled (cron)

A scheduled trigger fires the routine on a clock — once at a set time, or on a repeat. Pick a cadence:

• Hourly — choose the minute of the hour.
• Daily — choose the time of day (defaults to 09:00).
• Weekly — choose the day of the week and the time.
• Custom (cron) — write a standard 5‑field cron expression for anything more specific.
• Once — pick a single date and time; the routine fires one time and then won't run again. Good for a one-off launch or a scheduled cleanup.

Every schedule runs in a timezone you choose — the picker covers UTC and every Amazon marketplace region — so "9am" means 9am where your business is, not in UTC.

Webhook

A webhook trigger lets an external system fire the routine. This is what opens routines up to custom triggers — anything that can send an HTTP request can start an agent run.

When you save a routine with a webhook trigger, Autron generates two things:

• A URL unique to that trigger.
• A secret, shown to you once. Save it somewhere safe — it can't be recovered, only regenerated.

To fire the routine, send a POST to the URL with the secret in the x-routine-secret header:

curl -X POST \  -H "x-routine-secret: <YOUR_SECRET>" \  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \  -d '{"asin": "B07ABC1234", "reason": "low_stock"}' \  https://<your-agent-host>/api/routines/<routine-id>/triggers/<trigger-id>

The JSON body you POST is handed to the agent as part of the run, so your instructions can reference it. For example, an external system can POST {"asin": "B07ABC1234"} and your routine prompt can say "pause all campaigns for the ASIN in the payload".

Writing good instructions

Because a routine acts without asking, write the prompt as a clear, self‑contained brief with its own guardrails. Treat it like instructions to a capable assistant who will do exactly what you say and can't check in with you.

A good routine prompt usually has four parts:

1. Scope — which campaigns, products, or portfolios to touch. "…for my garlic‑press Sponsored Products campaigns…"
2. The condition — what to look at and the threshold that triggers action. "…any keyword target with 7‑day ACoS above 40% and at least 15 clicks…"
3. The action — exactly what to change, with limits. "…lower its bid by 15%, but never below $0.20."
4. The fallback — what to do when something's off. "If yesterday's data looks incomplete or anomalous, make no changes and summarize why."

Running on demand

You don't have to wait for the schedule. Run now (on the routine's detail page, or from its row menu) fires the routine immediately — perfect for testing a new prompt before you trust it to a schedule.

For webhook routines, Run now lets you supply an optional test payload — paste sample JSON and the agent receives it exactly as a real webhook would, so you can rehearse the whole path without curl or the secret.

A manual run executes in the background and can take up to a minute to appear; it'll show up in Recent runs and the sidebar, and update to its final status on its own.

Where runs show up

Every fire — scheduled, webhook, or manual — produces a run you can inspect.

• Recent runs on the routine's detail page lists each run with a status chip, how it was triggered, how long it took, and how long ago it ran.
• The run transcript opens the full headless conversation: the agent's reasoning, every tool it called (with friendly labels), and its final summary. This is where a read‑only "digest" routine puts its findings — and what an Email digest channel sends to your team.
• The sidebar marks routine runs with a ⚡ lightning glyph. An activity dot shows status at a glance: yellow = running now, lime/green = finished with something unread, grey = read. Routine runs are kept out of your normal chat inbox by default — toggle Show routine runs to fold them in.
• The Calendar tab on the Routines page shows upcoming scheduled runs so you can see what's going to fire and when.

What a run's status means

Safety and guardrails

Routines are built so that "unattended" never means "uncontrolled":

• Audit trail. Every Amazon Ads write is recorded in the Action log, same as interactive changes.
• Pinned seller. A routine only ever acts on the seller it was created for; the agent can't switch seller or profile mid‑run.
• No overlap. If a run is still going when the next trigger fires, the new one is skipped rather than running two copies at once on the same account.
• Time‑bounded. Each run has roughly a five‑minute ceiling and stops after a bounded number of steps, so a routine can never spin indefinitely.
• Ads‑access gate. If the seller's Amazon Ads access has lapsed, the run fails fast with a clear message instead of doing anything half‑way.
• Untrusted payloads. Webhook bodies are treated strictly as data, never as instructions.
• No silent no‑ops. If the agent says it made a change but the change didn't actually go through, the run is marked Failed — it won't report a green success for work that didn't happen.
• Won't improvise around failures. If a write is rejected by Amazon, the agent stops and records why rather than retrying blindly or chaining into speculative attempts.

Example routines

All of these are written as the routine Agent Instructions. They assume Sponsored Products (where the agent can create and modify campaigns directly) and use placeholder product names — swap in your own.

Scheduled

Daily bid sweep (cut wasted spend) — Daily, 7am

Scale up the winners — Daily, 7am

Weekly negative‑keyword harvest — Weekly, Monday 8am

Placement tune‑up — Weekly, Monday 8am

Morning health digest (read‑only) — Daily, 6am

Webhook (custom triggers)

Launch a campaign when a product goes live — Webhook

Pull back spend when stock runs low — Webhook

These webhook examples let you wire Autron into tools you already use — an inventory system, a BI alert, a Zapier/Make automation, or your own scripts — so an agent run kicks off exactly when your business logic says it should.

Tips for getting the most out of routines

• Match cadence to data. Amazon's reporting mostly refreshes daily — a daily morning sweep beats an hourly one for almost everything, and costs fewer credits.
• Run now before you trust the schedule. Fire a new routine manually, read the transcript, and confirm it did what you expected before leaving it to run on its own.
• Be specific and bounded. Name the scope, the threshold, the action, the limits, and the fallback. The tighter the brief, the safer the unattended run.
• One seller per routine. Routines are pinned — duplicate the prompt across sellers rather than expecting one routine to fan out.
• Review the first few runs. Skim the transcripts and the Action log after the first handful of fires to confirm the behaviour matches your intent, then let it ride.
• Pause instead of delete when you want a temporary stop — deleting a routine also removes its run history.

Quick reference