Smart Topic Switching

What is smart topic switching?

Smart topic switching lets your bot recognize when a visitor changes topics mid-conversation and jump to the matching workflow section instead of staying stuck on the current question.

Example: Sarah is being booked for an appointment. The bot just asked her for a preferred date. Instead, Sarah types "Actually, what are your hours today?" With smart topic switching on, the bot recognizes the topic change, jumps to the Hours / FAQ section, answers her question, and can return to booking when she's ready. Without it, the bot would have re-asked for the date and Sarah would have felt unheard.

The jump is powered by AI. It looks at the visitor's message, your workflow's available sections, and picks the best match. If it's not confident enough, it stays put.

When you should turn it on

Turn it on for any workflow where customers might change their mind mid-flow:

• Appointment booking
• Support intake
• Lead qualification
• Multi-step product discovery
• Onboarding / setup flows

Basically: any workflow longer than 2–3 questions where a real human might naturally redirect the conversation.

When it stays out of the way

The bot will never jump topics when the visitor is:

• In the middle of a payment (credit card, Apple Pay, etc.)
• Being asked to accept terms or a disclosure
• Actively filling out a form field the bot is waiting on

These cases are hard-gated by the system so the bot won't accidentally lose a visitor's progress.

Smart topic switching is also automatically skipped when the bot asked a multiple-choice or multi-select question — those expect a structured pick, not free text.

How to enable it

1. Open the Admin app.

2. Go to Account → AI Settings (or click the gear in the Workflows page → AI Settings).

3. Find the Smart topic switching card.

4. Toggle Allow mid-conversation topic jumps on.

That's it. The change applies to every workflow on your site immediately — there's nothing to publish per-workflow.

What it looks like in the conversation

When a jump happens, an entry appears in the conversation's activity log showing the move — for example: "Bot moved from Billing to Support" along with the visitor message that triggered it and the AI's confidence level.

You can use this to audit how often the feature fires and whether it's making good decisions on your specific workflows.

What it costs

Nothing extra. Smart topic switching uses Anthropic's Haiku model — our small, fast, low-cost classifier — and the cost is included in your plan's standard AI usage. There is no additional per-message charge to your account for the topic-switch evaluation.

Troubleshooting

The bot didn't switch when I expected it to. Open the conversation, enable the inline activity log, and look for the smart-topic-switching entry. Common reasons it stays put:

• The visitor was in a hard-gated state (payment, terms, active form-fill).
• The bot had just asked a multiple-choice question — those are skipped.
• The AI's confidence in the alternate section was below the threshold (the message was ambiguous, or no section was a clear match).
• The setting is off for your site — re-check Account → AI Settings → Smart topic switching.

The bot switched when I didn't want it to. Turn the toggle off, and existing workflows continue to behave exactly as they did before. You can also re-word your workflow section names to make them more distinct — the AI uses section names and descriptions as the matching signal.

I want to see how often it fires. Ask Moshky: "How many times did smart topic switching jump in my workflows this week?" Moshky will pull the trace log and summarize.

Routing across unconnected nodes

Your bot doesn't need wires between nodes for smart topic switching to work. If you have separate sections for BigCommerce, NetSuite, and general info on the same canvas, your bot can detect what the customer wants and jump there directly — even with no connecting line between the customer's current node and the destination.

To make this work well:

• Open each "destination" node and give it an Intent label (e.g. "BigCommerce questions", "NetSuite ordering"). The field lives in the right-side Properties panel under Routing — Smart Topic Switching.
• Add 2–5 example phrases per node (one per line), e.g. "can I check my BigCommerce order", "I need help with NetSuite", "shipment status".
• On the trigger node, set Jump mode to Anywhere on canvas — unconnected nodes OK (or leave it on the recommended Sections first, then anywhere).

Labeled nodes show a small purple Intent badge on the canvas so you can see at a glance which nodes are reachable via intent routing.

After the bot finishes the section the customer jumped to (or the customer signals they're done — "ok back to my main thing"), the bot tries to return them to where they came from so they don't lose their original task. You can disable this return behavior site-wide if you'd rather every jump be one-way.

Jump mode options

• Sections first, then anywhere on canvas (recommended) — the bot prefers jumping into named Section Entry nodes when you have them, then falls back to any labeled node.
• Anywhere on canvas — unconnected nodes OK — every labeled node is fair game on every turn. Best when your workflow is structured as parallel AI islands (one per platform/integration) without explicit sections.
• Within named sections only — strict legacy behavior. Use only if you've intentionally designed the workflow around Section Entry nodes and want no other jumps.