The birthday posts nobody remembers to update, the holiday content that goes stale, the weather messaging that's always a day behind, the engagement reports you never have time to pull?
With Revel Digital's Scheduled Tasks, that's exactly what happens. You write a natural language prompt describing what you want done, set a schedule, and the AI agent handles it — whether that means generating content, updating playlists, analyzing performance, or flagging problems before they reach your inbox.
This post is a practical playbook. Ten real-world tasks, each with a ready-to-use prompt you can copy directly into the Scheduled Tasks interface. No code. No design skills. Just describe the outcome you want and let the agent do the work.
How Scheduled Tasks Work
Navigate to Tools > Scheduled Tasks in the CMS and create a new task. You'll choose from several task types depending on what you need:
- Network Performance — Analyzes device health, uptime, and connectivity across your network. Can optionally auto-reboot unresponsive devices.
- Media Performance — Identifies which content is driving impressions and which isn't pulling its weight. Can auto-disable zero-impression content.
- Custom Prompt — Write any prompt you want and get an AI-generated analysis delivered via email on a schedule.
- Custom Prompt + Action — The most powerful option. Same natural language prompt, but the AI can also take action — creating content, updating playlists, modifying schedules, and managing your network autonomously.
Each task runs on a cron-based schedule you define: hourly, daily, weekly, or any custom interval. Results are logged and auditable, and actions are always opt-in.
Now let's get to the good stuff.
1. Employee Birthday Celebrations
The tedium: Someone on the team maintains a spreadsheet. Someone else is supposed to check it every morning. Someone else is supposed to make a graphic. Half the time, the birthday gets missed entirely — or worse, it shows up a day late.
Task type: Custom Prompt + Action · Schedule: Daily at 6:00 AM
The prompt:
Check the "Employees" Data Table for any rows where the birthday column matches today's date. For each match, create a celebratory media item with the headline "Happy Birthday, [Name]!" that mentions their department. Use a warm, upbeat tone. Publish each item to the "Lobby" and "Break Room" playlists and set it to expire at midnight tonight. If no birthdays match today, take no action.
Why it works: The task runs before anyone arrives. Birthdays never slip through the cracks. Content expires automatically so yesterday's celebration doesn't linger on screen the next morning. And because the AI generates the message, each one feels personal — not like a mail-merged template.
2. Holiday Content That Stays Ahead of the Calendar
The tedium: Somebody has to remember that Memorial Day is coming up, find or create appropriate content, get it scheduled, and then remember to pull it down afterward. Multiply that by every holiday, every location, every year.
Task type: Custom Prompt + Action · Schedule: Weekly, Monday at 7:00 AM
The prompt:
Review the "Company Holidays" Data Table and identify any holidays occurring within the next 14 days. For each upcoming holiday, generate a countdown-style message — for example, "Memorial Day is in 5 days — thank you to those who served." Keep the tone respectful and inclusive. If the holiday is less than 3 days away, also generate a themed greeting suitable for display on the holiday itself. Publish all content to the "All Locations" playlist and set each item to expire on the day after the holiday.
Why it works: One weekly task keeps your entire holiday content calendar running autonomously. The two-week lookahead means countdown content builds anticipation, and the auto-expiration means you never end up with a "Happy Fourth of July" graphic lingering into the following week.
3. Weather-Responsive Messaging
The tedium: Weather changes faster than anyone can update signage. By the time someone notices it's raining and swaps in a rainy-day promotion, the sun is already back out.
Task type: Custom Prompt + Action · Schedule: Every 4 hours
The prompt:
Get the current weather conditions and today's forecast for [your city]. Based on conditions, generate a short contextual message for a [retail/office/campus] environment:
- If temperature is below 20°F or there's a winter storm warning, create an urgent safety-focused message about road conditions and staying warm.
- If it's raining, generate an inviting message encouraging people to come inside — something cozy and welcoming.
- If it's sunny and above 75°F, write something upbeat that ties the good weather to the day's experience.
- If conditions are unremarkable, skip content generation entirely.
Publish to the "Entrance" and "Storefront" playlists. Set all content to expire in 6 hours.
Why it works: The AI doesn't just parrot the forecast — it reasons about the conditions and generates messaging that fits the context. The 4-hour cycle keeps content feeling current without overwhelming your playlist, and the conditional logic means screens stay clean on ordinary-weather days instead of displaying forced "It's 58 degrees and partly cloudy!" filler.
4. Audience Engagement Monitoring and Content Optimization
The tedium: You have audience analytics data — impression counts, dwell times, demographic breakdowns — but actually sitting down to review it, figure out what's underperforming, and make changes? That's a quarterly project at best.
Task type: Custom Prompt · Schedule: Weekly, Monday at 8:00 AM
The prompt:
Analyze audience impression and engagement data across all devices for the past 7 days. Identify the top 5 highest-performing content items by total impressions, and the bottom 5. For any content with zero impressions over the full week, flag it as a candidate for removal. For any device showing a significant drop in impressions compared to the prior week (more than 30% decline), flag it with possible causes — content staleness, scheduling conflicts, or potential device issues. Deliver the full analysis via email with specific recommendations for each underperformer.
Why this matters: This is the kind of analysis that typically requires exporting data to a spreadsheet and spending an afternoon on it. The AI agent does it every Monday morning and drops a clear, actionable report in your inbox before your first meeting. You get the intelligence; you just don't have to do the legwork.
5. Automatic Content Retirement
The tedium: Old content doesn't remove itself. Promotions that ended weeks ago, event announcements for things that already happened, seasonal imagery from two seasons back — it all piles up until someone does a manual audit.
Task type: Media Performance (with actions enabled) · Schedule: Weekly
The prompt (for Custom Prompt + Action alternative):
Review all content currently active in my playlists. Identify any media items that have received zero impressions in the past 14 days. For each, disable the item and remove it from all playlists. Generate a summary of all changes made and email it to me.
Why it works: The built-in Media Performance task type can handle the basics — flagging and disabling zero-impression content automatically. But if you want more nuanced logic (like checking metadata dates or distinguishing between intentionally paused content and genuinely stale content), the Custom Prompt + Action approach gives you full control over the criteria.
6. Network Health and Device Auto-Recovery
The tedium: A player goes offline at your downtown location on Friday afternoon. Nobody notices until Monday. That's three days of a blank screen — or worse, a frozen screen showing Thursday's content.
Task type: Network Performance (with actions enabled) · Schedule: Every 6 hours
The prompt (for Custom Prompt + Action alternative):
Check the status of all devices in my account. For any device that has been offline or unresponsive for more than 30 minutes, attempt a remote reboot. If a device has been offline for more than 24 hours and a reboot has already been attempted, send me an email alert with the device name, location, last known status, and the time it went offline. Do not attempt more than 2 reboots per device per day.
Why it works: The Network Performance task type handles the common case well — it analyzes uptime trends and can auto-reboot unresponsive players. The Custom Prompt + Action version adds escalation logic: try the automated fix first, then alert a human if the problem persists. The reboot cap prevents an endless reboot loop on a device with a hardware issue.
7. Dynamic Menu and Pricing Updates
The tedium: Your menu or pricing changes, and now someone has to manually update every screen in every location. For a restaurant chain or retail environment with frequent price changes, this can consume hours every week.
Task type: Custom Prompt + Action · Schedule: Daily at 5:00 AM (before opening)
The prompt:
Check the "Menu Items" Data Table for any rows where the "last_updated" column is within the past 24 hours. For each updated item, find the corresponding content in the "Menu Board" playlist and update the displayed price and description to match the table. If a new row has been added to the table (an item with no corresponding content on screen), create a new media item for it using the existing menu board style and add it to the playlist. Generate a change log of all updates and email it to me.
Why it works: Your source of truth is the Data Table — updated by your operations team, your POS integration, or an API. The AI agent handles the last mile: translating data changes into on-screen content changes, every morning, before the first customer walks in.
8. Content Performance A/B Analysis
The tedium: You suspect your new promotional creative isn't performing as well as the old one, but comparing them requires pulling impression data, normalizing for time-of-day and location, and actually doing the analysis. So you never do it.
Task type: Custom Prompt · Schedule: Weekly, Friday at 4:00 PM
The prompt:
Compare the impression and engagement performance of all content items added to any playlist in the past 30 days against content that has been running for 60+ days. For each new item, calculate its average daily impressions and compare against the playlist average. Identify any new content that is significantly underperforming (more than 40% below playlist average) and any that is outperforming. Provide a summary with recommendations — should underperformers be given more time, moved to different playlists, or retired?
Why it works: This gives you a regular performance feedback loop without requiring anyone to build reports or query databases. The AI handles the comparison logic and even offers strategic recommendations. It's not just data — it's analysis with a point of view.
9. Work Anniversary and Milestone Recognition
The tedium: Birthdays get attention; work anniversaries get forgotten. Tracking 5-year, 10-year, and 20-year milestones across a large organization means cross-referencing hire dates, calculating tenure, and creating appropriate content for each milestone tier. Most organizations simply don't bother.
Task type: Custom Prompt + Action · Schedule: Weekly, Monday at 6:30 AM
The prompt:
Review the "Employees" Data Table and find any rows where the hire date anniversary falls within the next 7 days. Calculate each employee's tenure in full years. Generate milestone-appropriate recognition content:
- For 1-year anniversaries, use a welcoming tone: "Celebrating one year with [Company]!"
- For 5, 10, 15, or 20+ year milestones, use a more distinguished tone that acknowledges the significance, mentioning their role and department.
- For other years, generate a brief, warm acknowledgment.
Publish each item to the "All Displays" playlist and schedule it to appear on the actual anniversary date, expiring the following day.
Why it works: Milestone recognition matters for culture, and the AI's ability to modulate tone based on tenure length means a 1-year and a 20-year anniversary feel appropriately different. The weekly scan catches everything in advance.
10. Weekly Signage Network Executive Summary
The tedium: Leadership wants to know if the signage network is healthy and delivering value. Pulling together a status report — device uptime, content performance, audience metrics, recent changes — takes time away from actual operations work.
Task type: Custom Prompt · Schedule: Weekly, Friday at 3:00 PM
The prompt:
Generate a weekly executive summary of my digital signage network. Include:
- Total device count, number currently online, and overall uptime percentage for the week.
- Total content impressions across all locations, with a comparison to the prior week (up, down, or flat).
- The 3 highest-performing content items by impressions and the 3 lowest.
- Any devices that experienced downtime exceeding 2 hours this week, with root cause if available.
- Any scheduled tasks that ran this week, with a one-line summary of each result.
- A brief recommendation section: one thing that's working well and one area for improvement.
Format the summary as a clear, scannable email suitable for forwarding to leadership. Keep it under 500 words.
Why it works: This turns your scattered operational data into a polished narrative — the kind of report that demonstrates ROI to executives. And it writes itself, every Friday, without anyone spending an afternoon compiling it.
Combining Tasks for a Fully Autonomous Content Calendar
Each of these tasks runs independently, but the real power emerges when you layer them together. A typical corporate deployment might run:
- 6:00 AM — Birthday and anniversary recognition content goes live
- 6:30 AM — Holiday countdown content updates for the week
- 7:00 AM — Weather-aware messaging refreshes
- Every 4 hours — Weather messaging cycles to stay current
- Every 6 hours — Device health check with auto-recovery
- Monday 8:00 AM — Engagement analysis report delivered via email
- Friday 3:00 PM — Executive summary generated and emailed
That's a content operation that runs 24/7, adapts to real-world conditions, recognizes employees, retires stale content, monitors its own infrastructure, and reports on its own performance — all without a single manual content update.
Getting Started
All Scheduled Tasks — including all AI Analysis types — are available today to Revel Digital customers. If you're new to the platform, you can access everything through a free 30-day trial with no credit card required.
To create your first AI agent task:
- Navigate to Tools > Scheduled Tasks in the CMS
- Click New Task and choose your task type
- Write your prompt using any of the examples above as a starting point
- Set your schedule using the visual cron editor
- Hit Run Now to test before enabling the schedule
The prompts above are ready to use as-is, but they work best when you customize them for your environment — use your actual playlist names, reference your specific Data Table column names, and describe your brand's tone of voice. The more specific you are, the better the results.
Your screens should work as hard as you do. Now they can.
