AI & Governance

AI agents are first-class actors in the helpdesk — they triage tickets, draft replies, and (where you allow it) act on tickets autonomously. This article explains what the AI does and, most importantly, how you keep a human above the loop. Configuration lives in Helpdesk Settings → AI governance.

The Guiding Principles

Three rules hold everywhere in the helpdesk:

AI-vs-human is always explicit. Every message and action records who (or what) produced it. AI replies are labeled as AI in the workspace, the portal, and email. The AI never impersonates a person.
A human is always reachable. Customers can press Talk to a human on any AI-handled ticket, and it escalates immediately.
Humans stay above the loop. AI acts only inside the envelope you define, and everything it does is logged.

What the AI Does by Default

Triage (on every new ticket) — a summary, sentiment, a suggested priority and type, missing-info questions, similar tickets, and relevant knowledge-base articles. These are suggestions only; they never change the ticket by themselves. Agents apply them with one click from the AI insights rail.
Draft with AI — generates a suggested reply grounded in the conversation and your knowledge base. It lands in the composer for a human to review, edit, and send. Nothing is sent automatically from the composer.

Neither of these changes a ticket or contacts a customer on its own — so they're safe to leave on.

Governed AI Actions

Beyond suggestions and drafts, an AI agent can act on a ticket — reply publicly, add a note, change status, solve it, set priority, assign a team, request info, send a follow-up, create a task, or update a CRM record. Every such action is classified by your policy into one of three buckets:

AI governance flow: an AI-proposed action is checked against policy, then runs immediately, waits in the human approval queue, or escalates to a human — and every action is attributed and audited.

Allowed — the AI performs it immediately (still logged and attributed as AI).
Needs approval — the action is held in the AI Approvals queue for a human to approve or reject before it runs.
Forbidden — the AI may not perform it; it escalates to a human instead.

Configuring the policy

In Helpdesk Settings → AI governance, for each action choose Allowed / Needs approval / Forbidden. Then tune the guardrails:

Autonomous resolution master switch — off routes would-be-allowed replies and solves to the approval queue, regardless of the per-action setting. A safe way to start.
Confidence threshold — when the AI's confidence is below this, an otherwise-allowed action is downgraded to "needs approval."
Sensitive topics — a list (e.g. legal, billing_dispute, cancellation, security, medical). If triage detects one of these on a ticket, AI actions on it always require approval, never auto-run.

A conservative, recommended starting point: allow internal notes and request info; require approval for public replies, solve, priority, and assignment; forbid everything else. Loosen as you build trust.

The AI Approvals Queue

Open Helpdesk → AI Approvals. Each pending item shows the ticket, the action the AI wants to take, its reasoning, the confidence, and the exact content (e.g. the reply text). You can:

Approve & run — the action executes immediately (attributed to the AI, with you recorded as the approver).
Reject — the action is discarded.

Approvals expire automatically if left unhandled, so the queue stays current. Make reviewing it part of a lead's routine.

Attribution & Audit

Every AI action is written to the audit trail and shown on the ticket timeline with its AI label. Because attribution is always explicit, your Reports can separate AI-touched from AI-resolved tickets and track how often AI actions are approved versus rejected — so you can see exactly where the AI is earning trust and where it isn't.