Polling agents are one of the least glamorous parts of AI assistant architecture, but they are also one of the most useful.
A normal chat assistant waits for the user to ask something. A polling agent keeps watching. It checks a source, notices changes, decides whether anything matters, and then acts. That action may be a notification, a summary, a draft, a tool call, or a full workflow.
This is how an assistant moves from "answer my question" to "keep an eye on this for me." Instead of being reactive, it becomes a background process that notices things on the user's behalf and acts when conditions are met.
The important design point is simple: do not make the language model responsible for time, state, retries, or locking. Use normal backend infrastructure for that. Use the model where it is valuable: interpreting messy context, making semantic judgments, and producing useful language.
What Is a Polling Agent?
