Refusal policy
Some questions shouldn't be answered by an AI agent, however good its knowledge. The refusal policy lists those topics and decides what the agent says instead.
Which topics are covered out of the box?
Every workspace starts with five topics:
- Pricing
- Roadmap (what's coming and when)
- Contracts and legal
- Security details
- Competitor disparagement (speaking badly of other companies)
You can switch each one off, and reword how it's recognised and what the agent says, but you can't delete them.
How does the agent decide?
Before it retrieves anything, every question is checked against your active topics. There are three outcomes:
- Answer: the normal case.
- Refuse: the question clearly falls under an active topic, and the agent gives that topic's refusal message instead of an answer.
- Defer: the question is something the agent shouldn't try to answer from your knowledge at all, such as small talk, questions about another named company, or live information it can't know. It says so politely.
How do I change what the agent says?
Open Knowledge → Refusal policy and pick a topic. For each one you can:
- switch it between Refusing this topic and Not refusing;
- edit the refusal text in English, and optionally in French and Arabic (blank translations fall back to English);
- edit the classifier description, the plain-language description the brain uses to recognise the topic;
- preview what the brain says when it declines, in each language;
- Save changes or Revert.
When a refusal text exists in the contact's language, it's used word for word.
How is this different from hand-over rules?
The refusal policy controls what an agent says about a topic. Hand-over rules, on Answer incoming messages, control when a conversation is passed to a person. Pricing is covered by both by default: the agent doesn't quote prices, and the conversation is handed to your team.
A topic is firing too often. What do I do?
Tighten its classifier description. "Pricing" described as "any question mentioning money" will catch far more than "questions asking what our product costs or for a quote". Test the change with Try it or in Conversations.
Can I let agents talk about pricing?
Yes. Switch the pricing topic to Not refusing, choose Agents may discuss pricing from our knowledge in the company profile, and make sure your knowledge contains the pricing you're happy to share. Consider the pricing hand-over rule too.