Skip to main content

Why is the AI not replying at all?

About half a dozen switches can quietly silence the AI on one conversation without anything looking broken. Check them in this order.

Your AI assistant has stopped answering, either on one conversation or everywhere. Most of the time this is a setting, not a fault, work through these checks in order.

Check these first

  1. Is a person already assigned to this conversation? The single most common reason. The moment anyone on your team is assigned, the AI stops answering that conversation completely, on purpose. Open the conversation and look at the assignee control in the header, if it shows a teammate's name instead of AI Assistant, that is your answer. See How do I give a conversation to someone else? to hand it back.
  2. Is the AI paused or turned off for just this conversation? Look for an "AI paused" or "AI off" label in the conversation header. See How do I take over from the AI in the middle of a chat? for how to check and how to hand it back with Resume.
  3. Is the AI turned off for this whole inbox? Check the inbox's Bot Configuration tab, under Settings, then Inbox. If AI handling is set to Off, nobody on this inbox is getting an automatic reply, ever, until you change it. See How do I turn the AI off for one inbox?
  4. Is the AI paused for your whole account? Settings, then AI Assistant, has its own broader Pause switch on the Overview tab, separate from the per-inbox and per-conversation controls above.
  5. Is it outside your business hours? Depending on your account, you can set the AI to hand conversations to a human rather than keep answering once you are closed. If that is turned on and it is currently outside your hours, an incoming message is queued for a person instead of answered automatically, this is working as intended, not a fault.
  6. Did a teammate just reply? Right after a human sends a message on a conversation, the AI goes quiet on that one conversation for a short window so it does not talk over your teammate. It wakes itself back up on its own, you do not need to do anything.

If something has actually broken on our side

This looks different from every case above: instead of silence, the customer gets a short message, "I'm having trouble responding right now. I'll have a team member message you back here shortly." and the conversation is automatically marked as needing a human. If you see that message, the AI did not ignore anyone, something briefly failed on our side and it handed off honestly rather than going quiet. You do not need to fix anything, just answer the conversation the way you would if a person had escalated it to you. If it keeps happening on multiple conversations, open Help in your sidebar and let us know, that pattern is something only we can diagnose.

Was this useful?

More in Something is not working

The other guides people read alongside this one.

Did this not cover it?

Start a chat and the assistant will try first. If it cannot help, it hands you to a person.

Or email support@peakifyhub.com. We answer within 1 business day, Mon–Fri.