A custom agent is a role you set up once that then works on campaigns for you: it comes up with ideas, plans them, and can take them live and review them through your connected tools. You decide which channel and tools it can touch, how often it runs, and whether it acts on its own or checks with you first.
Before you start
- You’re a manager of your team. Creating and editing agents is a manager-only setting.
- To let an agent use a tool beyond the built-in campaign tools, connect that integration first in Settings, under Integrations.
Create an agent
- Go to Settings and open Agents.
- Select New agent.
- In Name, give it something you’ll recognise, such as “Social campaigns” or “SEO”.
- Optional: in Instructions, describe how it should approach its campaigns. The agent follows these every time it runs.
- Optional: pick a Channel from the built-in list to focus the agent on.
- The built-in Growth Method campaign tools are always on for every agent. Under Connected tools, choose which of your other connected integrations the agent may use. Tools you’ve disabled stay off.
- Set Runs to how often the agent should run: Off, Daily, Weekly, or Monthly. Scheduled runs happen at 6:30am UK time: daily agents run every morning, weekly agents on Mondays, and monthly agents on the first of the month.
- Choose its Autonomy (see below).
- Select Create agent.
Your agent appears in the list with a Custom badge, alongside the built-in agents that power Growth Method. Autonomous agents also show a lightning-bolt icon next to their name, so you can see at a glance which ones run on their own.
How it runs your campaigns
Every campaign moves through the same stages, in the same order, every time:
Backlog → Planning → Live → Analysing → Complete.
These stages are fixed. An agent decides what happens within a stage, the plan, the copy, the results that matter, but it never chooses the order and never invents a step. Growth Method moves a campaign to the next stage in code, not by asking the AI, and only ever forward. It won’t run a campaign through the same stage twice, and an agent can’t skip ahead or loop back. This is the same track your team already uses for campaigns you run by hand.
That’s what makes an agent safe to leave running. However it plans or words a campaign, it can only move it along a track you already trust, one stage at a time and only forward. Even an autonomous agent acting in your connected tools can’t loop, skip ahead, or run a campaign through the same stage twice.
How far an agent takes a campaign
On a schedule, how far an agent takes a campaign depends on its autonomy:
- A Manual agent drafts a campaign idea and stops. It lands in your Backlog for you to review.
- An Autonomous agent writes the plan and moves the campaign to Planning. If you have accepted that it can act in your connected tools without review (see below), it carries on and takes the campaign Live on its own, working through the plan with your connected tools as it goes.
An autonomous agent only takes a campaign live when every step can be done without you. If a step needs a person, something only you can do such as briefing a colleague, or if a tool action fails, it stops at Planning and leaves a note of what is left, rather than launching a half-finished campaign. From Live, a campaign moves on to Analysing by itself once it has run for its set duration.
When you work with an agent in chat, you stay in the loop whatever its autonomy: you take each next step, you approve each action that touches a connected tool, and you decide when the campaign goes live. An agent moves a campaign forward on its own only during a scheduled run or Run now. When it reviews a campaign it waits for real results, so it won’t rush to a verdict or invent early numbers. It reviews a thirty-day test after thirty days, not on day one.
Tip: set Runs to Off while you’re trying an agent out, then switch it to Daily, Weekly, or Monthly once you’re happy with how it works.
Choose how much it does on its own
Autonomy controls whether the agent acts by itself or checks with you first:
- Manual: the agent drafts campaigns and waits for you to approve anything that changes a connected tool. It publishes nothing without your say-so. On a schedule, it leaves a draft in your Backlog.
- Autonomous: the agent acts without stopping to ask, including using your connected tools. On a schedule, once you have accepted the responsibility below, it takes a campaign all the way to Live on its own.
When you set an agent to Autonomous while it has connected tools, Growth Method asks you to confirm you understand it can launch campaigns and change or delete data in those tools without review. You won’t be able to save the agent until you tick the box to accept. Growth Method records who accepted and when, and shows that on the agent afterwards. Until you accept, an autonomous agent still stops at Planning on a schedule.
Whichever you choose, an agent can’t run away. A single turn is capped at a fixed number of steps, it can only move a campaign one stage forward, and it can’t repeat a stage, so it does the work in front of it and stops. On a schedule, an autonomous agent goes live only when every step can be done without you; if a step needs a person or a tool action fails, it stops at Planning and tells you what is left.
Start with Manual while you build trust in an agent, then move to Autonomous once you’re comfortable.
Warning: an autonomous agent uses your connected tools, and can launch campaigns, without asking first. Keep it on Manual until you’ve watched a few runs in chat and you’re happy with its work.
See what your agent did
The agents list in Settings shows each agent’s latest run outcome next to its last run time: the campaign it created, No campaign when it decided not to create one, or Failed, in amber, when the run hit a problem. A run cut off before it could finish shows Stopped early; open its thread and ask the agent to carry on where it left off. Each outcome links through to the campaign or the run’s conversation, so you can see what happened overnight in one click. A run still working through its steps shows No reply yet.
Every run happens in a conversation, and that conversation is the record. For each stage, the agent’s actions and the results it got back are written into the thread, in order. Nothing it does is hidden. Even a run that is interrupted and never finishes keeps its record: the thread shows what the agent was asked to do and notes that the run stopped early.
Anyone on your team can open a run’s conversation, even when the run created nothing. A run that declines to create a campaign, for example because everything it found was too close to a campaign you already have, explains its decision in that thread. You can reopen it at any time to see exactly what the agent did and why, long after the run has finished. It’s the same thread you watch when you test an agent in chat.
Who is Ada Lovelace?
Ada Lovelace is the automation account that runs your campaigns when no one is at the keyboard. You’ll first meet her in your team’s member list, in Settings under Users, even though no one invited her. She belongs to every team by default.
A few things to know about her:
- She isn’t a person, and she never signs in.
- When you set up an agent with a schedule, Ada creates new campaign ideas for you automatically on that cadence.
- When an agent runs on a schedule, it runs as Ada, and she’s credited as the author of any campaign it creates.
- She owns the campaigns she creates only until you take over. Move one of her campaigns to a new stage and it becomes yours. A campaign you already own stays yours unless you reassign it.
- She doesn’t direct the other agents. Every role runs either as you, when you work in chat, or as Ada, when it runs on a schedule. The steps and their order are the same both ways.
The name is a nod to Ada Lovelace, the 19th-century mathematician often regarded as the first computer programmer. Working with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine, an early mechanical computer, she wrote what many consider the first algorithm meant to run on a machine, and she saw what others missed: that such a machine could do far more than arithmetic. We named our automation account after her as a small tribute to that mix of method and imagination, the same qualities we built Growth Method around.
Try an agent out
You don’t have to wait for a scheduled run to see what an agent does. Go to Settings, open Agents, and select Edit on your agent. From there you have two ways to test it.
Start a chat opens a conversation with the agent so you can watch it work through a campaign, step by step. You see each step as it happens, and you set the pace: even an Autonomous agent waits for you to move the campaign to its next stage, and with a Manual agent you approve each action that touches a connected tool before it runs.
Run now starts a run immediately, exactly as a scheduled run would, so you can see what the schedule will do without waiting. Watch the agent’s row in the list: its latest run outcome appears next to its last run time, linking to the campaign it created or to the conversation showing its reasoning. A Manual agent drafts a campaign and leaves it in your Backlog; an Autonomous agent you’ve accepted responsibility for runs the full cycle and can take the campaign live in your connected tools, just as it would overnight.
Testing an agent, whether in chat or with Run now, doesn’t change its schedule. It still runs at its next scheduled time.
Next steps
- Connect more tools for your agent to use in Settings, under Integrations.
- Give the AI access to your data