How the agent decides what to say

Knowing the path a message takes explains most of what you will see in the inbox — why an answer took a few seconds, why the agent sometimes hands over instead of answering, and why it never invents a product.

The path a message takes

1. Messages are gathered first. Customers write in fragments — "hi", "do you have", "the red one". The agent waits briefly and treats the burst as one message, because answering each fragment separately produces three half-answers.

2. The request is classified. A fast pass decides what kind of message this is: a greeting, a product question, a complaint, an order detail. That decision selects how much effort the rest of the pipeline spends.

3. Your data is retrieved. The agent searches your catalog by meaning rather than keyword, and pulls anything relevant from your knowledge base. Photos and voice messages are understood too, not only text.

4. Tools run, invisibly. If it needs a fact it does not have — stock, a delivery address, an invoice — it calls the tool that knows, and the customer sees none of it. They see one answer that already accounts for it.

5. The draft is checked before sending. Two checks, both of which can stop a reply:

• Facts: does every product and every id in this answer actually exist in what the tools returned? An answer that names something invented is rejected rather than sent.
• Safety: no personal data leaked, no price overridden, no competitor discussed, within length, in your language.

6. It is sent, or a human is asked. A reply that passes goes out on the customer's channel. One that does not becomes an escalation.

Where it stops on purpose

The agent hands over when it is uncertain, when a customer is unhappy, when the request would need a price overridden, and when a check above rejects the draft.

An escalation is a normal outcome, not a fault. It arrives in your inbox with the whole conversation attached, so whoever picks it up starts informed instead of asking the customer to repeat themselves.

What it will never do on its own

• Offer a product that is not in your catalog. Every product it mentions comes from a real search result.
• Invent an order number, an invoice or a tracking code. Ids are checked against what tools actually returned.
• Change a price. A discount request becomes a handover, not a decision.

Why answers take a few seconds

Between steps 1 and 6 there are several calls: gathering, classifying, searching, sometimes a tool, then the checks. The wait is deliberate — the alternative is a fast answer that is wrong about stock or price, which costs far more than the seconds saved.

What changes what it says

Three things, in increasing order of how much they change:

1. Your knowledge base — terms, delivery rules, what is included. This is what stops "I'll check with a colleague" on routine questions.
2. Agent settings — tone, language, what it must never discuss.
3. Automation — a workflow can add an instruction for one conversation, switch its mode, or hand it to a person outright.