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.