Autonomy: where the AI may answer
On this page
Autonomy decides where Aura AI may answer on its own, where a human must approve first, and where it stays silent. It is at Settings → AI agents → Autonomy, and it is the setting every other AI feature sits underneath.
Anyone can read it. Changing it needs admin or owner.
Three modes
- Off — Aura stays silent. No draft, no send.
- Suggest — Aura drafts a reply and a human approves and sends it. This is human-in-the-loop, and it is the workspace default.
- Auto — Aura may compose and send the reply on its own.
The default, and rules on top of it
Default behaviour is shown at the top of the screen and is not editable here. Out of the box it is Suggest: a human approves every reply. Every channel and every category with no rule of its own resolves to it.
Everything else on the page is rules — explicit overrides. A rule targets a channel, a category, or both.
- Channel is a list: API, Contact form, Email, Phone, Slack, SMS, Microsoft Teams, Web widget, WhatsApp — or
*, meaning all channels. - Category is free text matched against your ticket tags and intents, or
*for all categories.
Pick a channel, a category and a mode, then Add rule. Each rule saves the moment you set it; there is no Save button on this screen. A rule whose scope already exists is refused with a message pointing you at the existing one, rather than quietly producing two rules that disagree.
Which rule wins
The most specific rule wins, and a category rule beats a channel-wide one. In order:
- Channel and category
- Category, across all channels
- Channel, across all categories
- The workspace default
This is the part that surprises people. A rule saying "Email is Auto" does not beat a rule saying "billing is Suggest", because category outranks channel. If you want billing on email to behave differently from billing everywhere else, write the rule with both halves filled in.
Rules are labelled with their scope in the list — Channel + category, Category · all channels, Channel · all categories, Baseline · everything — so you can read the precedence off the screen rather than reconstructing it.
Removing a rule sends its scope back to the default. That is the undo.
A caveat about channels
The channel list offers more channels than can currently be replied on. Sending outbound on Slack, Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp is not wired up yet, so an Auto rule on one of those has nothing to send through. The rule is stored honestly and will take effect when the channel does; it is not doing anything today.
Keep a copy on email
One workspace-wide switch sits at the bottom, off by default.
Keep a copy on email mirrors every customer-facing reply to the customer's email as a transcript, even when the ticket arrived on Slack or WhatsApp. It only sends where the customer actually has an email address and email outbound is connected.
It is a good default for a service desk whose customers treat email as the record of what was agreed, and unnecessary noise for one whose customers live in the chat widget. It changes nothing about who is allowed to answer — that is entirely the rules above.