AI Agents for reception, sales and support — or customize the AI Agent you need

An AI Agent is a conversational assistant that can manage customer chats across WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and other connected channels — all from one inbox. It understands intent so it can answer FAQs using your approved resources and take actions like collecting customer details, qualifying leads, routing conversations, or sending payment and booking links. On respond.io, you can start with ready-made roles like an AI Receptionist, AI Sales Agent, or AI Support Agent, or build a custom agent for specific tasks.

Traditional chatbots follow fixed flows or rules and often break when a customer goes off-script, resulting in a frustrating conversation loop. Respond.io’s AI Agents understand intent and context, so they can handle free-flowing conversations, reference your uploaded or live resources, and decide what to do next. They can collect data as workflow variables, update contact records, and even trigger next steps like routing or sending payment links. Because they do much more than just answer a set list of questions, they’re valuable for both sales and support.

No. You can get started instantly with preconfigured templates for an AI Sales Agent, AI Support Agent, and AI Receptionist. These templates come with common conversation flows and best practices built in, so you don’t need to design everything yourself. You can also customise them to fit your products, tone of voice, and workflows—or customize your agent if you have specific business needs.

AI Agents work on any channel you’ve connected to respond.io, including WhatsApp Business API, Facebook Messenger, TikTok, Viber, and Instagram. No matter the channel, all conversations flow into the same team inbox so your sales and support teams can monitor, step in, and report on performance.

AI usage is included at no extra cost on our self-service Growth, Advanced and Enterprise plans. To prevent misuse, we have a fair use policy with generous limits that 99% of our users will never reach so you can use AI without worrying about unexpected charges.

On respond.io, you control what they learn from. Point them to approved sources like product documents, help centres, websites, uploaded FAQs, snippets, canned responses, or even images. You can constrain their answers to these sources for accuracy. When your content changes, just update the sources and the AI Agent will use the new information right away.

Yes, you can test AI Agents before launching them on respond.io. The test panel is embedded into the setup flow and lets you chat with the AI Agent, reset threads and view or edit contact fields. It also simulates actions like assigning to users or teams, updating contact fields, changing lifecycle stages, processing files or images, and closing conversations.

This allows you to validate prompts, refine behavior and catch misconfigurations early. You get realistic outcomes using your own data and rules, clear visibility into simulated actions and smoother handoffs before going live with full confidence.

On respond.io, AI Agents are built to take the load off your team, not replace them. They handle repetitive, high-volume tasks like answering FAQs, routing enquiries, and qualifying leads so your human agents can focus on complex or high-value conversations. When it’s time to hand over, the AI Agent passes along the full context and history so customers don’t need to repeat themselves.

For example, it might qualify a sales enquiry and route only good-fit or ready-to-buy prospects to your team, while continuing to handle early-stage FAQs itself. This makes your team more efficient while ensuring customers always get the right level of service.

You can set your AI Sales Agent as the first point of contact on respond.io, whether it’s handling sales enquiries, product questions, or replies from Meta and TikTok ads. It can ask discovery questions, answer product or service FAQs, and enrich contact fields for your CRM. Once a prospect shows intent, it can send booking or payment links and route only qualified buyers to your sales team with the full conversation history. This helps you respond faster than your competitors, reduce your team’s workload and shorten sales cycles.

Yes. The AI Agent can analyze customer questions and stored contact data to suggest relevant products or services. For example, it can upsell premium models, cross-sell complementary items or highlight seasonal promotions. This helps businesses increase sales while ensuring customers receive timely, useful suggestions.

The respond.io AI Support Agent answers common questions from your support resources, interprets images shared by customers for extra context, and guides them through the next steps. If the issue is more complex or urgent, it escalates directly to the right support team and passes along the full conversation history. That way, customers don’t need to repeat themselves and agents can resolve issues faster with the full context at hand — all within the same conversation thread. This improves resolution time and high customer satisfaction.

Yes. The AI Agent can process images and common file types such as PDFs. It can identify products from a photos, read an order number from an invoice, or interpret an error message from a screenshot. You can also test how it handles these files during setup by uploading PDFs, images or documents to validate behavior before going live.

This capability reduces friction in conversations and makes support and sales conversations more accurate, often without needing human intervention.

If an AI Agent can’t find the right information — or if a customer requests for a human — you can set it up on respond.io so the conversation is immediately escalated to a human agent. Escalations are routed to the right team member with full conversation history, so the customer never has to repeat themselves. As a best practice, include an escalation instruction in your AI Agent prompts such as “If you cannot find relevant information, assign the conversation to a human.” This ensures smooth handoff and avoids leaving questions unanswered.

Accuracy depends on the quality of the resources you provide. Teams usually see high precision when answers are limited to well-structured FAQs or knowledge bases, and accuracy can be improved over time by auditing interactions and refining objectives. You can also add boundaries such as preferred phrasing or restricted topics on respond.io.

Yes. Respond.io’s AI Agents are designed to be safe enough for even the most regulated industries. Every Agent comes with built-in guardrails that prevent errors and unsafe responses, so you can confidently use them in sectors like healthcare, education, retail, or travel.

You decide what sources they learn from, how they escalate, and what compliance rules apply. Combined with GDPR compliance, ISO 27001 certification, and enterprise-grade infrastructure with 99.999% uptime, AI Agents give you the freedom to scale conversations securely and reliably across thousands — or even millions — of interactions.

Respond.io is built for enterprise use, with end-to-end safeguards such as encryption in transit and at rest, GDPR compliance, ISO 27001 certification, role-based access controls, 2-factor authentication, and SAML-based Single Sign-On. The platform runs on secure AWS infrastructure with daily backups, ensuring business continuity and rapid recovery.

AI Agents operate entirely within the platform and inherit the same enterprise-grade protections. With 99.999% uptime, businesses can rely on uninterrupted 24/7 operations. In addition, each AI Agent has built-in guardrails that minimize errors and seamlessly escalate to humans when needed, so automation remains reliable and safe at any scale.

Respond.io AI Agents are designed to be safe, reliable, and production-ready from day one. Guardrails are built into the AI agent itself, so you can scale with confidence without worrying about it going off track.

• Built-in protections: Accuracy safeguards and strict rules minimize errors and prevent hallucinations.
• Automatic escalation: If the AI cannot answer, it seamlessly hands off to the right human team member with full chat history.
• Customizable controls: Add your own business-specific guardrails to shape how the AI behaves.
• Production-ready by default: Safeguards are always enabled, so you can deploy AI Agents without hesitation.

Yes. Respond.io is built to handle large volumes of conversations without slowing down, and it maintains 99.999% uptime. Whether you’re managing hundreds of enquiries a week or millions across different regions, the platform scales with you. AI Agents are ideal for managing that scale because they can act as the first point of contact, answering FAQs, collecting data, qualifying leads, and routing conversations to the right team. This frees your agents to handle only the most complex or high-value conversations, while built-in reporting and analytics let you measure and improve performance over time.

Most teams on respond.io get started with templates for an AI Receptionist, AI Sales Agent, or AI Support Agent. You just upload or connect the sources you want it to learn from — documents, images, websites, or your help centre — and test it in a safe environment before going live. You can also include brand guidelines for voice and tone. For more complex needs, you can create a custom AI Agent for task-specific or industry-specific workflows.

Respond.io's AI Agent builds confidence by learning only from verified, high-quality data. Businesses get full visibility into what's crawled and ingested — no black boxes, no missing content. Even if a crawl fails, partial results are saved automatically, so no work is lost and every answer comes from trusted, up-to-date information.

Teams can fine-tune crawls with advanced configurations, multiple seed URLs, and filters to focus on what matters most. Expanded file support — including Markdown, CSV, DOCX, PPTX, and images — broadens coverage, while parallel ingestion ensures speed and scalability. This level of transparency and control sets respond.io apart, giving businesses reliable, consistent AI answers they can trust.