Guides

Working the inbox: what the AI handles, and when it hands over

Last updated 2026-09-14

The inbox is one thread per person, whichever channel they arrived on — WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger or the website widget. The AI is answering in all of them by default, and most conversations never need you.

The skill is knowing which ones do, and what to do when you have finished with one.

What it handles without you

Left alone, the assistant replies in seconds, answers from your approved documents, asks one or two qualification questions at a time, captures what the person tells it — budget, configuration, location, timeline — scores the lead, and offers a visit when they are ready.

It is deliberately not chatty. It asks at most one or two questions per message, because a form disguised as a conversation loses people just as fast as silence does.

The four things it stops for

A handover is not a failure. It is the assistant reaching an edge it was told not to cross, and there are four of them:

Something it cannot answer from your documents. The most common one, and the most useful to you — see below.
Price negotiation. Wanting the price CHANGED — a discount, a better rate, bespoke terms. Note the distinction: simply ASKING what something costs is an ordinary question and gets answered directly with the real figure, however many messages into the conversation it comes.
Legal, RERA or loan questions. Anything where being approximately right is the same as being wrong.
Complaints, and anyone who asks for a human. Immediately, without argument.

Taking a conversation over

Press Take over on any conversation and the AI stops replying in that thread. Everything after that is yours, sent from the same number the customer has been talking to, in the same thread. The handover is recorded, so who took a conversation and when is reconstructable later.

You do not need a reason and you do not need to wait for the AI to escalate. If you can see a deal worth handling personally, take it.

Giving it back — the button people miss

This is the part worth knowing: taking over is reversible. Press Resume AI and the assistant picks the conversation back up with the full history, including everything you just wrote.

Most people never press it, and their inbox slowly fills with conversations that are technically theirs forever. A lead you answered one legal question for at 11am does not need you to personally handle their follow-up at 9pm — hand it back when you are done with the bit that needed you.

Why this matters more than it sounds

A conversation in human hands is a conversation with no out-of-hours cover. The assistant answers at 2am; you do not. Every thread left in manual mode is one where the next message waits until someone happens to look.

A working daily routine

Start with handovers. These are the only conversations actually waiting on a person.
Then hot leads. Qualified and engaged. A personal message here is worth more than anywhere else in the list.
Skim the rest, do not work them. The AI is already following up on a schedule. Re-messaging someone it is already chasing reads as two people from the same business not talking to each other.
Hand back what you finished. Resume AI on anything you took over and dealt with.

Reading handovers as a to-do list

Every “I could not answer that” handover is a customer telling you what is missing from your knowledge base, for free, in their own words.

Answer the person, then fix the cause. If three people ask about maintenance charges and the AI hands all three over, the fix is not to answer faster — it is to upload the maintenance schedule, after which it answers that question forever. A handover rate that falls week on week is the clearest sign the system is bedding in.

Let it hold the conversations you cannot

Every enquiry answered in seconds, at any hour, and handed to you the moment it needs a person.