Autonomy
Where Aura may answer on its own, where a human must approve first, and where it stays silent — plus ticket policy, the approval window and the email copy default.
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, where the page is titled Autonomy, tickets & delivery, and it is the setting every other AI feature sits underneath.
Anyone can read it. Changing it needs admin or owner.
The three modes
| Mode | What it means |
|---|---|
| Off | Aura stays silent. No draft, no send. |
| Suggest | Aura drafts a reply on request; a person approves and sends it. |
| Auto | Aura may also send its reply with nobody in the loop, wherever auto-resolve is switched on. |
Suggest is human-in-the-loop, and it is the workspace default.
Auto is a permission, not a trigger
Setting a cell to Auto does not by itself make anything send. It removes the requirement for a human; auto-resolve is what decides whether a particular reply goes out, and it has guardrails of its own.
The default, and rules on top of it
Default behaviour is shown at the top of the screen and is not editable there. Out of the box it is Suggest: a human approves every reply. It covers every channel and every category that has no rule of its own.
Everything else on the page is Rules — explicit overrides. A rule targets a channel, a category, or both.
- Channel is one of the workspace's registered channels — API, contact form,
email, phone, portal, Slack, SMS, Microsoft Teams, web widget and WhatsApp —
or
*, meaning all channels. The list is read from the live channel registry, so it reflects what this deployment actually has. - Category is free text, matched against a ticket's tags and intents, or
*for all categories.
Pick a channel, a category and a mode, then Add rule. The 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 part 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 a 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 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 be replied on everywhere. An Auto rule on a channel with no working outbound leg has nothing to send through. The rule is stored honestly and will take effect when the channel does; it is not doing anything today. The channels guide says which adapters receive only.
Ticket policy
Below the rules, a second question is asked per channel: does what arrives here become a ticket at all?
| Policy | What happens |
|---|---|
| Always open a ticket | Everything on this channel becomes a ticket. This is the default, and what happens on any channel you leave alone. |
| Only if unresolved | The ticket is opened as usual and retired to a deflection if Aura's answer solved it. It is a full ticket — in the queue, SLA running — for the seconds the answer takes, so this changes the record rather than the moment. |
| Never open a ticket | No ticket at all; the interaction is counted as a deflection instead. |
Only if unresolved needs a verdict from the helpdesk's own auto-resolve, so it can only settle on the channels where auto-resolve produces one. On a channel that cannot settle it, the screen says so rather than letting the row look active.
Never open a ticket is the one to read carefully. Auto-resolve answers on a ticket, so it does not reply on a channel with no ticket. Choose it where the channel's own AI already answers the customer, or where you only want the interaction counted.
Where deflections have happened, a summary above the rows counts them.
The approval window
At the bottom of the page, Approval window sets how long an Aura action proposal waits for a human decision before it closes itself undecided. The default is 24 hours, and the picker offers 4 hours, 8 hours, 24 hours, 2 days, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days and 30 days. Only an admin can change it.
This is the unstated half of "a human must approve first". See Approvals.
Keep a copy on email
One workspace-wide switch, 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 another channel. 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.