ChatGPT Work scheduled tasks can now trigger on Gmail, Slack, and GitHub events

From time-based to event-driven: what’s changed

Scheduled tasks in ChatGPT Work started life as a straightforward time-based tool. You could tell ChatGPT to run a prompt once, or on a repeating schedule, and it would get on with it. Useful, but still essentially a glorified cron job.

OpenAI has now added a second trigger mechanism: webhooks. Instead of waiting for a clock to tick, a scheduled task can fire the moment something happens in a connected app. The supported sources at launch are new Gmail messages, new messages in a Slack channel, and activity on a GitHub pull request.

For Plus and Pro users on web, iOS, and Android, this means you can set up tasks like:

• Summarise any email that arrives announcing that registration has opened for an event
• Draft a set of next steps whenever a client posts feedback in a specific Slack channel
• Flag or comment on a GitHub pull request when a particular kind of activity occurs

The difference in practice is significant. Time-based scheduling is fine for reports and digests. Event-driven triggering is what you need when the work itself depends on something unpredictable arriving.

A few things worth knowing before you set one up

Slack requires an extra step. You need to add @ChatGPT to each Slack channel you want it to monitor. It will not listen to channels it has not been explicitly invited to, which is sensible from a privacy standpoint.

Approval steps pause the task. If a task needs to take an action that requires your sign-off, it will wait until you review it rather than proceeding automatically. You can follow progress, answer questions, and change direction as the task runs.

Webhook triggers are for paid plans. Free and Go users cannot create webhook-triggered tasks. Time-based scheduled tasks remain available to Free users, with a limit of three active tasks that can run once or recur no more than once per day.

Active task limits across plans are:

• Go: up to 3 active tasks
• Plus: up to 5
• Business and Edu: up to 10
• Pro and Enterprise: up to 15

Task sharing: your clever workflow, someone else’s benefit

The other meaningful addition here is task sharing. Plus and Pro users can now share a scheduled task with collaborators. Recipients get to review the instructions, adjust the schedule if there is one, connect their own apps, and save an independent copy tied to their own account and permissions.

For Business plan users, sharing is scoped to members of the same workspace, which keeps things tidy from an admin perspective.

The important nuance for shared webhook-triggered tasks: the recipient needs access to ChatGPT Work and must connect their own version of the relevant app. Your Gmail connection does not carry over to someone else’s copy of the task. Each person runs it under their own credentials, which is exactly how it should work.

This makes task sharing genuinely useful for teams. If someone on your team figures out a reliable workflow, say a GitHub PR summary that routes action items into a Slack thread, they can share the template and colleagues can wire it up to their own accounts without having to rebuild it from scratch.

The broader picture for ChatGPT Work

ChatGPT Work, which runs on GPT-5.6, is OpenAI’s agentic offering for longer, more involved workplace tasks. It can research and analyse information, work across connected apps and files, and produce finished documents, spreadsheets, presentations, reports, and sites. It can also handle tasks on websites that require signing in, surfacing a secure login prompt when needed and maintaining the session for future runs so you are not logging in repeatedly.

Scheduled tasks, with their new webhook capability, slot into this as the automation layer. Rather than kicking off every task manually, you can set conditions and let Work respond when those conditions are met.

OpenAI first introduced a dedicated scheduling section in the ChatGPT sidebar in June 2026, alongside improvements to how users track and edit scheduled requests. Webhook triggering is the next logical step, moving the feature from scheduling convenience to genuine event-driven automation.

What does this mean for you?

If you are on Plus or Pro and you regularly check Gmail, Slack, or GitHub for something that then triggers a follow-up action, this is worth exploring. The workflow does not have to be complex. Even something as simple as having ChatGPT summarise incoming emails from a specific sender, or flag new comments on a pull request, removes a layer of manual monitoring from your day.

If you are on a Free plan, the webhook features are not available to you, but time-based scheduling is. Three active tasks with daily recurrence is enough to handle a few routine prompts, such as a morning briefing or an end-of-day digest.

And if you have built a task that works well, the new sharing feature means you can pass it to colleagues rather than explaining how to recreate it. They connect their own apps, adjust anything they need to, and run their own copy. Less setup friction for everyone.

The scheduled tasks help article on the OpenAI Help Centre is the clearest reference for what is supported on each plan, including app availability and workspace admin settings for Business and Enterprise users.