respond.io Onboarding · Lesson 05
Lesson 05 · Your AI teammate
Working with your AI teammate.
Your Zelix setup includes an AI agent that works alongside your team, replying to customers around the clock. This lesson explains what it handles, the guardrails it runs under, and exactly how you step in when a human is needed.
Think of your AI agent as a teammate with a very specific job, not one bot trying to do everything. It is set up and tuned by Zelix for your business, and it sits inside the same Inbox you already know.
What your AI teammate does
Depending on how your system is configured, your AI agent can greet new enquiries instantly, answer common questions, qualify leads, book or reschedule appointments, and route the conversation to the right person. It replies in seconds, around the clock, so a message at midnight gets the same response as one at midday.
The guardrails it runs under
AI is powerful, but left unchecked it can make things up. Every agent we build has hard limits, not suggestions. Your AI teammate:
- Quotes only prices you have explicitly provided. No number, no guess. It tells the customer and routes to your team.
- Never invents policies. Refunds, warranties and cancellations come only from your knowledge base.
- Does not browse the internet or answer outside what it has been taught.
- Auto-escalates sensitive topics like complaints, refunds and legal questions straight to a human.
- Keeps every answer traceable, so you can see where it came from.
When it hands over to you
The AI is designed to know its limits. It passes a conversation to a human when it does not have the answer, when the customer asks to speak to a person, or when a topic is flagged as sensitive. When it hands over, all previous messages and context transfer with it, so the customer never has to repeat themselves.
- 1The AI replies instantly, day or night, within its guardrails.
- 2A pricing question trips a hard limit, so it escalates instead of guessing.
- 3You pick up with the whole conversation already in front of you.
How to take over a conversation
You are always in control. At any point you can take over from the AI, and it will step aside and stop replying to that contact until it is handed back. In practice your day looks like this:
- Watch the Inbox for conversations the AI has escalated or assigned to you.
- Open the conversation and take it over, so the AI pauses on that chat.
- Reply as the human, using everything from the earlier lessons.
- Close the conversation when it is resolved, or hand it back if appropriate.
Help your AI teammate get better
The AI is only as good as what it knows. When you spot a question it could not answer, a price that changed, or a new policy, tell your Zelix team. We update its knowledge sources and instructions so it handles that case correctly next time. The more you feed back, the more it takes off your plate.