xAI looks set to retire Grok's standalone Tasks feature and integrate it into a broader automations system, according to signals spotted in a recent build. The change would retain the scheduling capabilities that Tasks already offers, running a saved prompt once, daily, on chosen weekdays, monthly, or on a custom cadence, while adding two controls that give users more influence over how each routine operates.
The first control is the ability to select which Skills an automation can utilize. Skills, introduced by xAI in mid-May, are reusable workflow packages, bundles of instructions, scripts, and resources that Grok can invoke on demand. By tying them to automations, a scheduled job could rely on a saved capability rather than generating a fresh prompt each time.
The second control is model selection. Tasks already includes an Expert mode toggle for a stronger model, so a proper picker would formalize and expand that choice across every automation.
The final implementation of these changes is still uncertain. Currently, Tasks is accessible via the clock icon on Grok ewb and in the mobile apps. However, it is unclear whether the revamped automations will be available in the desktop Grok Build app, which surfaced earlier in May, on the web client, or both. No timeline has been provided, and nothing is live yet, though the pace of recent Grok releases suggests it is imminent.
The rationale behind these changes is straightforward. xAI, now under SpaceX, has been integrating Tasks, Skills, and an agentic desktop app into a productivity platform designed to compete with Claude Code and Codex. By consolidating scheduling, skill choice, and model choice into a single automations layer, Grok is moving away from being just a chat box toward becoming a configurable workspace, a path similar to OpenAI's, where Codex already runs reusable skills and allows users to set a model within its own automations.
