Implementation method

After activating email in your AI Agent and setting up handoffs, and testing your email setup to ensure it’s working properly, you can implement email so your AI Agent can start addressing your customer inquiries.

Your AI Agent can currently only respond on behalf of one email address. Your AI Agent’s email address should be different from the support email address used by your Human Agent team to prevent the forwarding of conversations in flight with your human team to your AI Agent.

Forward your support emails to Ada

There are two main ways to forward your email support inquiries to your email AI Agent:

Direct email: As soon as a customer sends an email to your company’s support email address, forward it to your AI Agent.
Via API: Use Ada’s Email API to send inquiries to your AI Agent for automated email resolution. This can be useful for use cases like:
- When your customers fill out an existing form hosted on your website. You can do this with various types of forms, like Zendesk ticket or Salesforce contact forms.
- Submitting your support ticket backlog to your AI Agent
- Other systems customers can use to start email conversations.

You can use one or a combination of implementation methods to create your ideal email automation support flow. In this section, we’ll provide you with some example implementation options as a starting point.

Direct email

With this method of implementation, customers will send inquiries to your support email, inquiries will be forwarded to your AI Agent, and your AI Agent will respond from your support email address.

Benefits	Things to consider
You can set custom forwarding rules, routing only a percentage of your conversations to your AI Agent	Unless you have percentage-based routing rules in your forwarding setup, 100% of the emails that your customers send to your support email address will be forwarded to your AI Agent to respond to.
You can set up spam filtering as part of your forwarding rules, so you can prevent spam conversations from being forwarded to your AI Agent.	Currently, your AI Agent can only be configured with one email address; if you have multiple support email addresses, you will need to choose one to generate DNS records for. Your AI Agent will respond to your customers with the address you configure.
	If you don’t set up DNS records in your domain configurations, your AI Agent will respond to your customers from its Ada-provided email address (not your support email).
	If at any time you wish to stop your AI Agent from handling responses, you can stop forwarding emails to it.
	Make sure the support email address you use for your AI Agent is publicly available to your customers.

Send emails to your AI Agent via Email API

The Email API allows you to send support inquiries from sources like ticket backlogs, or contact form submissions to Ada for automation. Upon receiving these inquiries, your AI Agent will reply to end users directly in their inbox to continue the conversation and drive resolution autonomously.

Review the benefits and Considerations of the Email API below to determine if this is the right method of email implementation for you.

Benefits	Things to consider
You can control the number and type of contact form inquiries that get sent to your AI Agent to resolve, using tagging, submission topic dropdowns, or volume configurations built into your agent platform.	Your AI Agent will reach out to the customer’s email address that was provided in the contact form. Subsequent back-and-forths will occur in an email thread. These back-and-forths occurring over email don’t get synced into your agent platform.
You can also pass metadata through the Email API. Passing metadata creates metavariables in the dashboard that you can leverage to configure your AI Agent (e.g., making rules based on an informational field you pass).	Ada’s Email API doesn’t support passing attachments; you have to exclude contact form inquiries that have attachments when configuring your trigger for the API call.
	Because email forwarding is required for this implementation option, if it’s also the email that you use for direct email inquiries, those will also get routed to your AI Agent to resolve. If you wish to omit direct emails from your AI Agent’s scope to resolve, we recommend you set up a different email address for contact form handling, and that you don’t expose that address publicly to customers to reach out to. The same DNS record/forwarding instructions apply to the setup for this separate email address.

Benefits

Things to consider

You can control the number and type of contact form inquiries that get sent to your AI Agent to resolve, using tagging, submission topic dropdowns, or volume configurations built into your agent platform.

Your AI Agent will reach out to the customer’s email address that was provided in the contact form. Subsequent back-and-forths will occur in an email thread.

These back-and-forths occurring over email don’t get synced into your agent platform.

You can also pass metadata through the Email API. Passing metadata creates metavariables in the dashboard that you can leverage to configure your AI Agent (e.g., making rules based on an informational field you pass).

Ada’s Email API doesn’t support passing attachments; you have to exclude contact form inquiries that have attachments when configuring your trigger for the API call.

Because email forwarding is required for this implementation option, if it’s also the email that you use for direct email inquiries, those will also get routed to your AI Agent to resolve.

If you wish to omit direct emails from your AI Agent’s scope to resolve, we recommend you set up a different email address for contact form handling, and that you don’t expose that address publicly to customers to reach out to.

The same DNS record/forwarding instructions apply to the setup for this separate email address.

For more details, refer to the Email API documentation.

Implementation examples

Hybrid Implementation: Direct email + Email API

You can use both direct email and Email API implementation methods to automate inquiries on all fronts, expanding your AI Agent’s scope of responsibility.

Benefits	Things to consider
Maximize your AI Agent’s oversight, handling even more inquiries automatically, and reducing the strain on your live agents.	Your AI Agent will automatically create tickets in your agent platform for inquiries that originated from a contact form, but it won’t make tickets for inquiries over direct email.
	If you want direct emails and contact form submissions to create a ticket in your agent platform, and then route those inquiries to Ada via Email API, make sure to use a different support email address for the AI Agent than the email address used to create those tickets in the agent platfrom from direct email.

Agent platform tickets

If you use any alternate methods to create tickets in your agent platform (outside of contact forms or direct emails), you can use the Email API to route tickets from your Agent platform to your AI Agent.

Implementation notes

Regardless of a conversation’s implementation method (direct email, contact forms, agent platform tickets), you can view conversation transcripts in the Conversations section of the Ada dashboard.
- However, if a conversation happens in an email thread, that conversation won’t appear in your agent platform, unless a handoff with a transcript occurs.
If a conversation starts with your agent platform and later gets handed off, the handoff doesn’t update the original ticket.
Ada has a Zendesk Conversation Solution sync available if you need to sync contained conversations that your AI Agent was able to handle without handoff back into Zendesk. Contact your Ada team to learn more.