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Abandoned Bot System

The Abandoned Bot System is how the Q-AI Bot follows up when a contact goes quiet in the middle of a conversation. It is the re-engagement layer that decides when to nudge, what to say, and when to give up, so a stalled chat is nudged back or cleanly closed instead of going cold.

This behavior is driven by a background automation workflow called AI Abandoned Bot, which checks active AI conversations every 4 minutes, between 8 AM and 9 PM, and acts on any that have gone silent.

The ladder concept​

Each project has an escalation ladder: an ordered list of timed steps. The AI Abandoned Bot walks this ladder one step at a time, starting with the gentlest follow-up and escalating from there.

Step modes​

Every step has a mode that decides what happens when it fires:

ModeWhat it does
textSends a fixed, pre-written message. No AI involved. The exact text you configured is sent as-is.
aiRuns a fresh AI re-engagement turn on the project's own model, so the nudge is phrased in context for this specific conversation.
closeEnds the AI session with the reason Inactivity and hands the chat back.
The last step is always a close

A ladder must end with a close step. This guarantees that a silent conversation eventually wraps up cleanly instead of nudging forever. See Conversation Lifecycle for what happens after the handoff.

How timing works​

Each step has its own delay, measured from the last event: either the contact's most recent reply or the previous nudge sent. Delays are incremental, not cumulative from the start of the conversation.

For example, a ladder of "5 minutes, then 10 minutes" means:

  • Step 1 fires 5 minutes after the contact's last message.
  • Step 2 fires 10 minutes after step 1 was sent, so 15 minutes into the silence, not 10.
Nudges fire on a cycle, and pause overnight

Because the check runs every 4 minutes within the 8 AM to 9 PM window, a nudge fires at the next check after its delay elapses (timing is approximate to within a few minutes, never to the second), and any step due outside that window waits until the window reopens the next morning. Design your delays with that in mind.

Total delay is capped at 12 hours

The combined delay of all steps in a ladder cannot exceed 12 hours. This is a platform rule: a ladder that adds up to more than 12 hours of waiting will be rejected. Design ladders that finish (reach their close step) within that window.

Reset on reply​

The ladder is not a one-way trip. Any reply from the contact restarts the ladder from the top. The moment a new message comes in, the conversation is "active" again, the step counter goes back to the beginning, and timing is re-measured from that fresh reply.

So a contact can be nudged, reply, drift off again, and be nudged again: each silent stretch gets the full ladder.

A note on cost​

text steps are free to run: they just send a message you already wrote. ai steps are different:

ai steps use model usage and count toward the conversation

Every ai step runs a real turn on the project's model, so it consumes model usage and counts as a message in the conversation, the same way a normal AI reply does. If you want re-engagement without that cost, use text steps instead. Reserve ai steps for cases where a context-aware, personalized nudge is genuinely worth the spend.

The default ladder​

Out of the box, every project starts with:

[
  { "delay_mins": 5, "mode": "text", "msg": "היי, עדיין פה?" },
  { "delay_mins": 10, "mode": "close" }
]

The ladder is fully configurable per project: you can add more steps, change delays, swap in ai steps, and customize the text. See Per-Project Settings for where the ladder lives and how to change it.

A ladder with every mode​

A ladder is an ordered list of steps. Each step has a delay_mins (minutes since the last event), a mode, and either a msg (for text) or a prompt (for ai); a close step needs neither:

[
  { "delay_mins": 5,  "mode": "text",  "msg": "Hi, still there? Happy to keep helping whenever you're ready." },
  { "delay_mins": 15, "mode": "ai",    "prompt": "Write a short, friendly nudge that refers to what the contact last asked about and invites them to continue." },
  { "delay_mins": 30, "mode": "close" }
]

That sends a fixed reminder after 5 minutes of silence, a context-aware AI nudge 15 minutes after that, then closes the session (reason Inactivity) 30 minutes later. Delays are incremental and must total under the 12-hour cap.

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