Key concepts

Ask runs AI agents that answer your customers, and hands a conversation to your team when a person is needed. These are the ideas the rest of the docs build on.

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Workspace and roles

Your company’s account in Ask is a workspace. Everything in it, agents, conversations and settings, belongs to that workspace alone. Everyone in the workspace has one of two roles: Admins invite people under Users.

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Agents

An agent is what answers your customers. You can have several, for example one for your web shop and one for wholesale customers. Each agent has its own settings:

• Persona: its instructions, first message, display name and language.
• Documents: the sources it answers from, such as your website, an FAQ or a Google Sheet. Sources live in the workspace library and are attached to the agents that should use them.
• Tools: what it can look up or do in other systems, such as order status in Shopify or a call to your own API.
• Procedures: step-by-step ways to handle a task, like a return or an order question.
• Memories: short facts it answers from until they expire, like a delay at the carrier this week.
• Escalation rules: when it hands a conversation to your team.

The Playbook describes, in plain language, how the agent handles each customer topic, written from these settings.

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Draft and published

An agent always has two versions that matter:

• The draft is what you edit. It saves as you go, and the Test panel talks to it.
• The published version is what customers talk to. Nothing you change reaches customers until you choose Publish.

Each publish becomes a numbered version you can find under Versions, test again, copy back into the draft or make live again. Conversations already open keep the version they started with.

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Channels

A channel is where customers reach an agent: Channels always use the agent’s published version.

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Conversations, cases and handoffs

Every exchange with a customer is a conversation. Conversations lists everything your agents have handled, with filters such as whether it was automated or needed a person, and the customer’s rating. The Inbox is where your team works. Each piece of customer work there is a case, shown on a board by state: The agent hands over when a customer asks for a person, when it judges it can’t help, or when one of its escalation rules matches, such as a high-value order. You can Take over a case the agent is handling at any time, Assign it to someone, and Resolve it when it’s done.

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Testing

Before customers see a change, try it in the Test panel, which talks to your draft. Tests are saved conversations that check the agent still answers correctly after a change, so you can run them before every publish.