When an inbound message arrives, an AI agent reads the conversation, looks things up, and decides what to do. It runs on the chat-slot model you set under AI Models.
Reply or draft
The agent rates its own confidence in the reply it wrote.
- Confident enough, and it sends the reply itself. The message bubble carries an AI label and the confidence figure, so you can tell it apart from something a person typed.
- Not confident, and it posts the reply as a draft in the timeline with the reason it hesitated, and stops replying to that customer until someone sends or discards it. See AI drafts.
- Out of its depth, and it escalates: no reply, no draft, and a pool task so somebody picks the conversation up.
When the agent stays quiet
- The customer carries the
bot:disabled tag. The Auto-reply on / off button in the conversation header toggles that tag.
- The workspace has no chat slot set under
/settings.
- The AI credential is revoked or failing.
To stop the agent everywhere at once, revoke the AI credential under /settings/ai. It cannot call the model, so it halts immediately. What the agent knows
| Source | What it contributes |
|---|
| Customer profile | Name, language, country, company, tags |
| Conversation | Recent messages on the thread |
| Knowledge base | Passages from the product documents that match the inbound text |
| Lead memory | Notes the agent saved about this customer on earlier turns |
What the agent can do
Each of these is a tool it calls, and each call shows in the timeline trace.
| Area | Tools |
|---|
| Answering | Search knowledge base, check product list, attach a document, send the reply, send email |
| Memory | Recall lead memory, save a note about this lead |
| CRM | Update lead profile, link company, add or remove a tag, add to segment, check segments |
| Ownership | Check team members, assign owner |
| Deals | Create deal, move deal stage |
| Scoring | Read fit criteria, read fit scores, update or adjust a fit score |
| Handling | Schedule follow-up, escalate to a human, suppress contact, change auto-reply setting |
Watch the agent on one or two real customers before letting it work the whole inbox. It writes to the CRM — tags, owners, deals and scores — not only to the conversation.