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AI deflection budget — cap, soft alert, and savings

AI ticket deflection resolves customer questions from your knowledge bases before a ticket enters the human queue, and every self-serve resolution has a per-resolution cost. Inbox → Settings → AI deflection (owner or admin) is where you keep that spend predictable: a monthly resolution cap, a soft alert that warns before the cap trips, and a savings panel that compares AI resolution cost against what a human agent would have cost. Every control on the page is tenant-owned — nothing applies until you set it. With no cap configured (0 = unlimited), the page is a read-only savings report.

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Everyday cost control

Three numbers working together keep AI resolution spend predictable:
  1. The monthly resolution cap. A ceiling on how many conversations the AI resolves per calendar month (counted as “resolved by AI”). 0 means unlimited.
  2. The soft alert. A percentage of the cap — when monthly usage crosses it, the page’s warning banner flips to a low-warning state so you see the limit approaching before it becomes a hard stop. Default 80%.
  3. The hard-pause switch. What happens at the cap: enabled, the deflection engine stops proposing answers and new questions go straight to the human queue; disabled, the engine keeps resolving with the banner showing the cap is reached.
The savings panel does the math on each resolution: human-agent cost per ticket (you set a per-ticket figure in cents; $7.50 default) minus the AI per-resolution charge.

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Walkthrough

Open Inbox → Settings → AI deflection. This console is split across the settings page, and only owners and admins can save changes.
  1. Usage header. Three cards describe the current calendar month: AI resolutions so far against the cap, the projected month-end count (a straight-line extrapolation — noisy in the first days of a month), and net savings.
  2. Set the cap. Under Budget controls, enter the monthly AI-resolution ceiling. 0 keeps the engine uncapped.
  3. Set the soft alert. Enter the percentage of the cap at which the warning state activates, between 0 and 100.
  4. Set the human-agent cost. Enter the per-ticket human cost (cents) you want the savings math to use.
  5. Decide the cap behavior. Turn Auto-pause when cap is reached on or off.
  6. Save. Changes take effect immediately — the next deflection attempt reads the new config.
The page carries two other sections beside the budget console. Deflection savings / ROI is a read-only report over a chosen window; it settles real per-token LLM spend instead of the flat per-resolution estimate, so use it as the authoritative figure. Deflection controls (on the same page) is where the engine itself is tuned: enable/disable, the confidence threshold, and the fallback message a customer sees when the AI declines to answer. Set the ceiling here; tune the engine there.

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How the cap interacts with ticket counts

A resolution is a conversation flagged resolved by AI: the deflection engine matched the customer’s first inbound message to a knowledge-base answer, and either the customer explicitly confirmed the answer helped or an auto-deflect flow closed it. Each confirmed resolution stamps the conversation’s metadata, and the budget endpoint counts those stamps month to date. Deflection signals arrive on the ticket-deflection routes your widget and inbox UI call — principally POST /inbox/tickets/:id/deflect (KB match plus suggested answer) and its confirmation siblings (customer accepts or rejects the suggestion). Three boundaries decide what counts:
  • Cap trip. The current month’s total crosses the cap. With hard pause on, every new deflection attempt hands the conversation to the human queue before any AI work runs.
  • No first inbound message. A conversation with no customer message is never eligible — it returns a no-deflect response and does not move the counter.
  • Declined matches. When the confidence check fails, the deflection suggests nothing and nothing counts toward the cap, even though the engine spent on the attempt.

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What happens when the cap trips

With Auto-pause when cap is reached off, nothing blocks: the banner simply reads that the cap is reached, and deflection continues under your scrutiny. With Auto-pause when cap is reached on:
  • New deflection attempts return a shouldDeflect: false response with a reason field explaining the pause — the widget and inbox UI see a clean no-answer instead of an error.
  • The conversation is left for a human: no AI answer posts, and agents see the thread in the normal queue.
  • On the next calendar month roll-over the counter resets to zero and the pause lifts automatically.
The check fails open: if the budget pre-check hits a transient database error at attempt time, the engine proceeds with the deflection rather than denying every tenant’s deflections for one blip.

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Reading the savings panel

The header savings card shows three figures:
  • Human cost — resolutions so far multiplied by the human cost you set.
  • AI cost — resolutions multiplied by the flat per-resolution AI charge.
  • Net savings — the difference. Savings go negative if your configured human cost per ticket is below the AI per-resolution charge — the panel shows the signed figure rather than clamping.
Two caveats:
  • The flat estimate is an approximation. Use the ROI section (same page) for the settled figure: it bills per-token spend over a chosen window and reports a gross-vs-net split.
  • Uncapped months. A month with no cap still shows savings — the percentage line switches to “no cap configured” instead of a share of the ceiling.

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API parity

The dashboard reads and writes two endpoints — you can automate the same configuration: PUT sends only the fields you want to change; the others persist. Full request/response schemas live in the Inbox API reference.

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Troubleshooting

Related: Inbox tickets workflow · Inbox setup · Routing rules · Inbox settings map