# What is an always-on agent?

An always-on agent is an AI agent that keeps working with no person in the conversation: it runs in the background, picks up work from standing goals, schedules, or events, acts on it, and comes back to you with a result or a request for approval.

OpenAI uses the term directly: its September 29, 2026 announcement calls dots "always-on agents" that run on their own cloud computer, connect to over 4,000 apps through plugins, and do read-only "proactive research" when you aren't working with them. Google uses other words for the same shape. Its Gemini agent, announced at Gemini at Work 2026 in an October 9 post, can be assigned work, scheduled, or set to respond to events, and keeps running for hours or days after you close your laptop; a "coworker agent" version holds a persistent role with its own identity and email address. Google's AQuA (Ambient Quality Agent), published on October 8 in the google/adk-recipes repository, is a narrower case: it runs beside a production agent and reviews a sample of up to 1,000 recent sessions on a schedule, after each deploy, or on demand.

Because nobody reads each result as it happens, dots ships an Activity View for following background work, and AQuA keeps a dashboard of the issues it has found. An agent that runs around the clock can be [up the whole time and still wrong](/answers/agent-reliability/is-agent-reliability-the-same-as-uptime), and that only shows when someone looks.

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Sources:
- OpenAI, "Introducing dots" (September 29, 2026): https://openai.com/index/introducing-dots/ (fetched 2026-10-18)
- Google Cloud Blog, "Gemini at Work 2026: Introducing Gemini agent" (October 9, 2026): https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/welcome-to-gemini-at-work-2026 (fetched 2026-10-18)
- Google Developers Blog, "The Outer Loop, Insights First: An Ambient Quality Agent That Diagnoses Your Production Agent" (October 8, 2026): https://developers.googleblog.com/en/the-outer-loop-insights-first-an-ambient-quality-agent-that-diagnoses-your-production-agent/ (fetched 2026-10-18)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/always-on-agents/what-is-an-always-on-agent
More on Always on agents: https://tessary.ai/answers/always-on-agents
From Tessary, agent reliability for AI agents in production: https://tessary.ai