The Agent is the automation engine in AB Sales — it fills the gaps on your leads and sends your campaign emails so you don't have to. It runs on a 5-minute timer, only on leads, and only when you've enabled it. Manage it from the Agents tab.
What it does, in four stages
Each tick, the Agent walks up to 10 leads per workspace and runs whichever stages apply. Stages are gated on what's missing — it never overwrites information you've already entered.
1Find the website
- Runs on leads with a Name but no Website.
- Tries the lead's corporate email domain first (fast, free), then falls back to an AI grounded in web search.
- The URL must respond and the page must mention the company name before it's saved; otherwise the attempt is logged and retried after 24 hours.
2Research the website
- Runs on leads that now have a Website but no Email.
- Reads the homepage, then asks AI for the best contact email, a short company description, and a contact name.
- The email is sanitized to a bare address; noise mailboxes (
jobs@,no-reply@,press@) are skipped.
3Send the next campaign email
- Runs on leads that match an active campaign and have a step due.
- Gated on: mail configured, at least one active template, daily cap not reached, lead not opted out.
- Sends that step's template via Microsoft Graph, then moves the lead to Contacted and posts a Teams card.
- Follow-up steps only go out if the lead hasn't replied since the last send.
4Draft a reply
- Runs when a lead replies to one of the Agent's automated emails — instead of the reply just silently stopping the campaign, this stage picks it up.
- Drafts a response grounded in the lead's own context and your template library, then posts it as a review card on the lead's email thread with Send / Dismiss buttons — nothing goes out until a human approves it.
- Off by default and configured separately: turn on Enable AI reply drafting in Settings, which itself requires the Agent above to already be enabled.
- An optional Auto-send without review toggle (off by default, with a visible warning when on) skips the review step and uses its own daily send cap — separate from the campaign cap above, since drafting itself is never capped, only sending is.
Stage 3 does nothing until you've built a campaign. There's no default template that goes to everyone — a lead is emailed only when it matches an active campaign with at least one step. If the Agent seems to be researching leads but never emailing them, that's almost always the reason. See Campaigns.
AI confidence alone isn't trusted — the respond-plus-mention check on websites and the noise-mailbox filter on emails keep junk out of your CRM.
The post-send Teams card
Every automated send drops a card into your notification channel with the lead, contact, template, and timestamp — plus two buttons:
- Stop automating this lead — the Agent never touches that lead again, at any stage.
- Mark as bad lead — same, plus moves the status to Disqualified.
Pausing the whole Agent
- Set a Paused until timestamp on the Agents tab to skip the workspace until then — useful before a holiday or during an incident.
- Auto-resume is silent: the first tick after the pause expires picks the workspace back up. No re-enable click needed.
Per-lead opt-out
Set the Automation opt-out flag on a lead (from its detail panel or the post-send card) to exclude it from all four stages. It records who set it and when, and you can unset it later.
Tips
- Start with the Agent disabled, manually email a few leads to validate the template, then enable.
- Keep the daily cap low at first (5–10) and raise once you trust it.
- Begin with a single one-step campaign before building longer sequences — it's the easiest way to confirm mail is really going out.
- The lead's Notes feed the AI research prompt — context there gives better anchors.
- If a lead keeps getting skipped, its detail panel logs the exact reason from the last attempt.