Cron and scheduling run a task automatically at a chosen time or repeated interval. Time is the trigger. Cron is an old Unix scheduling system, but people now use the word loosely for any scheduled task: nightly, weekly, or every five minutes. Scheduled work usually isn’t AI. A script can pull a transcript or check an inbox on a cron with no model involved; that’s plain automation, and AI enters only if you ask a model to understand, summarize, or decide something.
An office opening checklist captures it. Every morning at 8:00, unlock the office. Every Friday at 4:00, send the weekly report. Nobody makes a fresh decision each time: the schedule says when to look, the checklist says what to do.
Why you care
The trigger changes the design. If you want a daily digest, schedule it. If you want an instant reaction to a Stripe payment, use a webhook, which fires because something happened rather than because time passed. Cron is how software keeps a simple promise: do this thing at the right time, every time.