AI Rules

Use AI to analyze messages and trigger actions based on content.

AI rules let you analyze message content beyond simple keywords. Instead of matching text patterns, AI can understand what a message is actually about.

AI Rules require the Productive or Business plan, plus an AI integration (OpenAI, Anthropic Claude, or Google Gemini).

How AI rules work

1. Create a rule with a Prompt condition

2. Write a simple instruction for the AI

3. The AI reads the message and responds

4. Your rule acts based on that response

Standard rules vs AI rules

Standard rules match patterns:

• Sender contains a domain

• Subject includes keywords

• Message was sent to a specific address

AI rules understand meaning:

• Detect sentiment (urgent, angry, positive)

• Identify request types (refund, support, sales)

• Extract information (deadlines, action items)

• Understand context that keywords can't capture

Combine both: use standard conditions to filter first, then apply AI only to relevant messages. This keeps costs down.

Setup

1. Go to Settings > Integrations > Add integration > choose your AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini)

2. Connect your account and enter your API key

3. Create rules with AI conditions or actions

AI costs are billed to your provider account based on usage. Missive doesn't charge extra for AI features. See Setting up AI for detailed setup instructions.

Model selection

When creating AI conditions, you can choose which model to use:

Provider	Model	Description
OpenAI	GPT-5 Mini	Fast, cost-effective for most tasks (recommended)
OpenAI	GPT-5 Nano	Fastest, lowest cost option for simple classification
Anthropic	Claude Haiku 4.5	Fast, cost-effective for classification tasks
Google	Gemini 2.5 Flash	Fast, cost-effective with large context window

Debugging AI rules

Enable Log prompt result in conversations to see what the AI returns for each message. This adds a conversation event showing the AI's response, which helps you:

• Verify your prompt produces the expected output

• Debug rules that aren't firing correctly

• Fine-tune prompt wording

Enable this option on each rule that uses the prompt you're debugging.

Log prompt result in conversations is only available for the Prompt condition. It is not available for AI actions like Add label(s) with AI, Add AI note, or Create draft with AI.

AI actions

Action	What it does
Add AI note	Posts an AI-generated summary or analysis to the conversation
Create draft with AI	Generates a reply draft you can review before sending
Add tasks with AI	Extracts action items and creates tasks
Add label(s) with AI	Categorizes the message and applies labels

Use cases

Customer service

• Escalate upset customers to senior agents

• Identify support request types

• Summarize complex issues

Sales

• Distinguish leads from general inquiries

• Categorize prospects by need

• Draft responses to common questions

Legal

• Detect deadlines and time-sensitive requests

• Extract important dates as tasks

• Identify specific legal issues

General

• Summarize long threads

• Translate messages

• Extract action items

Privacy

• You connect your own AI provider account

• You control which messages get processed

• Content is sent to your provider only during rule processing

• Providers don't store data beyond the immediate request

For example prompts and configurations, see AI Rules templates.