Factor 11 Trigger From Anywhere - 12 Factor Agents

If you're waiting for the humanlayer pitch, you made it. If you're doing factor 6 - launch/pause/resume with simple APIs and factor 7 - contact humans with tool calls, you're ready to incorporate this factor.

Enable users to trigger agents from slack, email, sms, or whatever other channel they want. Enable agents to respond via the same channels.

Benefits:

Meet users where they are: This helps you build AI applications that feel like real humans, or at the very least, digital coworkers
Outer Loop Agents: Enable agents to be triggered by non-humans, e.g. events, crons, outages, whatever else. They may work for 5, 20, 90 minutes, but when they get to a critical point, they can contact a human for help, feedback, or approval
High Stakes Tools: If you're able to quickly loop in a variety of humans, you can give agents access to higher stakes operations like sending external emails, updating production data and more. Maintaining clear standards gets you auditability and confidence in agents that perform bigger better things