WhatsApp lead autopilot AIAI feature

A WhatsApp enquiry that sits unanswered for four hours is usually a lost lead. The Lead Assistant answers straight away: it greets the enquirer, asks for the details your workspace requires, saves them as a contact, and opens a request — then steps aside when the conversation needs a human.

You keep control throughout. Every chat has a switch, and turning it off puts you in the conversation instead.

Before you start

• The Lead Assistant is switched on per workspace. If you can't find it in Settings, ask your Reonic contact to enable it.
• You need a WhatsApp Business number and a Facebook Business account. The connection runs through Facebook's signup flow.
• The number can't already be connected somewhere else. WhatsApp Business allows one platform at a time, so disconnect it from any other tool first — the setup page's How to disconnect helper shows where.

Connect your number

1. Go to Settings > Company settings > WhatsApp Lead Assistant.
2. In the connection panel, click Login with Facebook and work through every step in the Facebook window: log in, pick or create a Business account, choose Connect WhatsApp Business App, enter the number, and approve it on your phone. The How to connect helper walks through each stage.
3. When it's done the panel shows Connected to WhatsApp Business with your number. If it still says Connecting…, click Refresh status.

Decide what the assistant does

Automatic replies. The Reply automatically toggle sets whether the assistant answers new conversations by default. You can leave it off and switch the assistant on chat by chat instead.

Tools. Turn on Create contacts so the assistant asks each new enquirer for the details you need and saves them. Then optionally turn on Request project creation so it opens a request afterwards — this stays unavailable until contact creation is on, because a request needs a contact to hang off.

Which details it asks for isn't set here. It follows your workspace's Required fields settings, so change them in Settings > Required fields and every form changes with them. First and last name are always required. The phone number comes from the chat automatically and is never asked for. Everything else — email, address, postcode — is asked for only if your settings require it, so a workspace that requires neither can capture a name-only lead.

Bot context. In About your company, write a short description of your business. This plus your company name is the only information about you the assistant will ever share, so it's worth a few careful sentences. If you have an offer template with an "About us" section, an import banner offers to pre-fill from it.

Pick a Personality — Default, Professional, Friendly, Efficient or Quirky. It changes tone, nothing else.

Handover. Choose what the enquirer hears when the assistant hands over:

• Optional (the default) — it says goodbye when there's something to say goodbye about.
• Always — it says goodbye every time.
• Never — it hands over silently, and the enquirer simply waits.

Handover instructions let you say in your own words when it should hand over and how the goodbye should read.

Access. Every admin can see the chats. Use Add user or Add team to share access more widely, then Save access.

Take over a conversation

1. Open Lead Assistant from the navbar. This is its own inbox — these chats don't appear in your personal inbox.
2. Open the chat. The assistant's activity shows inline as small event markers: autopilot on and off, handovers with the reason, contacts and requests created.
3. Switch autopilot off for that chat. While it's on, the assistant owns the conversation and you can't send into it — that's deliberate, so you and the assistant never talk over each other.
4. Reply as yourself.
5. To give it back, switch autopilot on again.

When it hands over

The assistant hands a chat to a person when it has done what it can, when it's out of its depth, or when someone won't give the details your settings require. A handover turns that chat's autopilot off and records the reason.

Some handovers are silent — always under Never, and under Optional when the very first thing someone sends is a voice note, file, image, video or sticker with nothing else to work from. Watch the inbox for chats with no assistant reply, because those are the ones nobody has been told about.

If something goes wrong on Reonic's side, the assistant turns itself off for that chat and sends a single apology saying a colleague will take over, rather than looping or going quiet.

Things to know

• It only creates, never edits. The assistant creates a new contact for each enquirer. It can't look up or change your existing customers — the only record it can correct is the one it just made in that chat. Expect some duplicates and clean them up; the alternative is letting an anonymous stranger reach into your CRM.
• Returning customers are the exception. Where a chat is already linked to a project, the assistant can attach a file to it and, where bill reading is enabled, link a read electricity bill. It still can't reach any other project.
• One contact and at most one request per conversation.
• It chases missing details a few times, then hands over rather than nagging indefinitely.
• It can read text, PDFs, TXT, CSV and images, and it transcribes voice notes. It can't read video or stickers — it asks once for a resend, then hands over.
• It sends text and tappable options only. Reply buttons and lists, yes; links, images and attachments, never.
• It never invents an answer. On price, product or availability it doesn't know, it says the team will come back to them.
• It never asks for payment details or passwords.
• It only replies to recent messages, so a backlog redelivered after a WhatsApp outage won't trigger a flurry of late replies.
• The 24-hour rule applies to you too. WhatsApp only allows a free-form reply within 24 hours of the enquirer's last message. Come back later and you may have to wait for them to write again — that's WhatsApp's rule, not a Reonic setting.
• Group chats aren't supported. Only one-to-one conversations appear.

Last updated on September 9, 2026