Your AI Connector Docs

Switch AI Agent Mid-Conversation

Most accounts run more than one AI Agent: a sales agent, a support agent, one per product, one per language. Entry Points decide which agent picks up a brand-new conversation. But conversations change direction: the lead your sales agent was talking to now has a support question, or the person who came in through a keyword for one product asks about another.

This page is about handing an existing conversation to a different agent, in two ways: by hand from the chat, or automatically by rule with an Automation.

What “switching” does

When you assign a different agent to a contact:

  • From the contact’s next message, the new agent answers. It uses its own instructions, knowledge base, tone and abilities.
  • The conversation history stays exactly where it is. The new agent reads the whole chat, so the contact never has to repeat themselves.
  • Nothing is sent at the moment of the switch unless you ask for it (see Let the AI reply straight away below).

Keyword rules in Entry Points never do this on their own: they only look at the first message of a new conversation. Someone already mid-chat with one agent stays with that agent until you, or an Automation, move them.

Option 1: from the chat (by hand)

  1. Open the conversation in Chats.
  2. Open the chat menu (the three dots at the top of the conversation).
  3. Choose Assign AI agent and pick the agent that should take over.

That’s it: the next reply comes from the new agent. Pick No agent (team handles replies) to send the conversation back to your team with no AI answering.

Option 2: by rule (Automations)

The Assign AI agent action in Automations does the same hand-off as a step in a workflow, so it can happen automatically whenever a rule matches. The classic example is a support keyword: anyone who writes “support” mid-conversation gets moved to the support agent.

1. Create the automation. In the sidebar under AI Studio, open Automations and click New automation.

2. Set the trigger. Pick Incoming message. In its settings:

  • Contains text (optional): the word or phrase that should trigger the switch, for example support.
  • Agent (optional): leave it empty to watch every conversation on the account, or pick one agent so only that agent’s conversations can be switched away. (Useful when only your sales agent should hand off to support, not the other way round.)

3. Add the action. Click the + under the trigger and pick Assign AI agent (under Contacts). Fill it in:

  • Contact ID: click + and insert the contact from the trigger. Don’t type an ID by hand.
  • AI agent: pick the agent that should take over from the list. If the agent should come from an earlier step instead (a lookup, say), use Use a value from an earlier step instead and insert it with +.
  • Let the AI reply straight away: set to true if the new agent should answer the message that triggered the switch immediately. Leave it empty and the new agent simply waits for the contact’s next message.
  • Start follow-ups if they don’t reply (optional): switch it on and, when the AI does not reply straight away, the new agent’s follow-up messages are scheduled using the agent’s follow-up settings, so someone who never writes back still hears from you. If they reply, the normal conversation takes over.

4. Turn it on. Switch the automation on. From now on, a message containing your keyword moves that conversation to the chosen agent.

Ideas that use the same step

  • Escalation by intent: let the sales agent call an Automation with the AI Agent Function trigger when it decides the person needs support, and put the hand-off inside that automation. No keyword needed, the agent decides.
  • Language routing: a Condition step on a custom field (say, language) followed by one Assign AI agent step per language.
  • Back to sales: a second automation with the reverse keyword, so a support conversation that turns into “how much is it?” lands with sales again.

Replaced an old agent with a new one?

When you build a new agent and stop using the old one, existing conversations don’t move across by themselves. Everyone the old agent ever talked to stays assigned to it — deliberately, so creating a new agent can never change a conversation that’s mid-chat. But it also means a lead who comes back weeks later still lands with the old agent, and if that old agent is switched off, nobody answers at all: the conversation just sits there marked AI Paused.

One automation fixes this for good:

  1. Trigger: Incoming message, with Agent set to the old agent. Leave Contains text empty so every message counts.
  2. Action: Assign AI agent — insert the contact from the trigger, pick the new agent, and set Let the AI reply straight away to true so the message that just arrived gets answered too.
  3. Turn it on.

From then on, any returning contact who is still on the old agent gets moved to the new one the moment they message you, and answered right away. Contacts already on the new agent are untouched — the trigger only matches conversations that still belong to the old one. Leave the automation on for as long as old conversations might still come back.

The trigger’s agent list includes agents you’ve switched off, so you can pick the old agent even after disabling it.

Let the AI reply straight away only fires when there is something to answer. If the contact is already on the agent you pick and their last message has already been answered (or the agent already decided to close the chat), the step still assigns the agent but does not send another reply. That keeps a tag-based automation from looping: if the agent’s own tags trigger an automation that assigns that same agent, the contact no longer gets the same reply over and over.