Campaigns & Agents — Who Does What

A campaign is a plan; an agent is a worker. What happens where the two meet — which agent runs your campaign, why a campaign has no autonomy setting, and why campaign drafts always wait for you.

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Lesson 1: Plan and Worker

The cleanest way to hold the difference:

An agent is a worker you hire. A campaign is a brief you hand it.

An agent has a name, a personality, a role, jobs, a schedule and an autonomy level. It exists indefinitely. It is who does the work.

A campaign has a subject, an angle, a window and a plan. It has no personality, no schedule of its own, and no autonomy. It is what the work is about.

They are not alternatives. A campaign runs through an agent — every campaign week is executed by a content-creator agent in your workspace. If you have never hired one, the campaign hires one for you.

AgentCampaign
What it isA workerA brief
LifespanIndefinite1–4 weeks
Has a personalityYesNo
Has an autonomy levelYesNo — always review
Has a subjectNoYes, a theme
Has an editorial angleImplied by its personaExplicit, one of six
Can publish without youYes, if set to autoNever
Judged byOngoing outputA single readable outcome

Lesson 2: Which Agent Runs Your Campaign

You do not assign a campaign to an agent, and there is no picker for it. The run resolves the right agent itself, in this order:

  1. An active content-creator agent in your workspace. If you have one, it is used — preferring the preset the work calls for.
  2. An agent in an error state. It is reactivated and used. A fresh attempt is what clears a system flag, and hiring a duplicate around a flagged agent is how workspaces end up with three near-identical Hype Men.
  3. A paused agent stops the run. If your only content-creator agent is paused, the campaign refuses to start and tells you which agent and why. Your pause is respected — Bolta will not hire a second agent behind your back to get around it.
  4. No agent at all? One is hired from the preferred preset.

Two consequences worth knowing:

If your campaign will not start and the message names a paused agent, resume that agent. This is a common and completely silent-looking failure otherwise — the campaign is fine, the plan is fine, and nothing will happen.

Hiring an agent for a campaign does not switch on recurring posting. When an agent is auto-hired this way, the recurring job that normally comes with a new hire is removed immediately. Starting a campaign must never quietly turn on a standing schedule you did not ask for.

The hidden job

Each workflow the platform runs has a hidden system job behind it, shared by every run of that kind. It carries none of your campaign's per-run configuration — no accounts, no plan. That is deliberate: the row is shared, so writing your campaign's targeting onto it would put two concurrently running campaigns in a race over the same field.

Your campaign's own settings ride on the run itself. This is why two campaigns with different accounts, different voices and different tones can run in the same week without interfering.

Lesson 3: Why a Campaign Has No Autonomy Setting

Agents have four autonomy levels:

LevelBehaviour
ManualNever acts on its own
AssistedDrafts, then waits for approval
AutoApproves and acts by itself
AggressiveLike auto, and proposes new work

Campaigns have none of these, and the reason is a single design decision:

A campaign always requests review. Its drafts land in the Approve queue, every time, regardless of your workspace autonomy or the agent's level.

You pressed "activate a plan", not "post these". A plan that published itself the moment you saved it would make the activation button the most dangerous control in the product.

So a workspace set to fully autonomous will still have its campaign drafts wait for a person. If you want content that publishes without review, that is an agent with a job on a schedule — not a campaign.

A few related mechanics, since they interact:

  • Autonomy can be tightened but never loosened as it flows down. A job can demand more oversight than the agent; it can never grant less.
  • Safe mode on the workspace forces approval everywhere, overriding everything below it.
  • Per-agent autonomy is honoured only once you have confirmed it. An agent showing a level you never explicitly saved runs on the workspace default instead, so nothing escalates by surprise.

Lesson 4: What Each One Is Better At

Use an agent when:

  • You want a permanent capability — someone who replies to comments, someone who watches for prospects, someone who reports on performance.
  • The work is ongoing and has no ending.
  • You genuinely want things to happen without you.
  • The job is not writing scheduled content at all — hunting, engaging, analysing, relationship management.

Use a campaign when:

  • The content is about a specific thing.
  • There is a start and an end you can name.
  • You want to read a result and decide whether the angle worked.
  • You want a countable plan rather than an open-ended stream.

Use both, which is the normal case:

A content-creator agent gives you baseline presence. Campaigns sit on top for launches, promotions and pushes. An Engager agent handles the comments those campaigns generate. An Analyst tells you which angle earned attention, which is the input to your next campaign's angle.

A common mistake

"I'll make my agent do the campaign."

You can tell an agent to write about your launch, and it will. What you lose is everything a campaign gives you: the countable plan, the window, the single angle applied consistently across every piece, the derived result at the end, and the ability to duplicate the whole shape when it works. An agent given a subject produces posts. A campaign produces an answer to "did this angle work?"

What to take away

  • Agent = worker, campaign = brief. A campaign runs through an agent.
  • The agent is resolved for you; a paused content-creator agent stops the campaign, by design.
  • Campaigns always request review. They cannot auto-publish, on any autonomy setting.
  • The pairing to aim for: agents for standing capability, campaigns for pushes.