Hand the reply to an SMS AI agent is a setting on one individual text inside a workflow. When the contact texts back, the campaign stops and an SMS AI agent picks up the thread and answers what they said. The behavior that surprises people is where the setting lives and how long it stays armed, so this walks through both.
Where the setting lives
- Open AI Voice & Chat in the left navigation and click the Workflows tab.
- Click Create Workflow, or click an existing workflow to open it.
- Go to the Cadence step of the builder and expand any SMS step.
- Tick Hand the reply to an SMS AI agent, then pick an agent from the dropdown underneath.
The checkbox only appears if you already have at least one SMS AI agent built. If you tick it and leave the agent dropdown empty, the app warns you that it falls back to just pausing the campaign — because it does.
Ticking it also ticks Pause campaign if the contact replies for you. The agent and the campaign are never allowed to text the same person at once, so the handoff always stops the campaign first.
If the workflow has other texts you wrote yourself, you get a prompt: Apply this to every SMS in the workflow? Choose Apply to all unless you deliberately want only one text to hand off.
The setting belongs to the text, not the contact
This is the part that catches people out. The toggle is stored on that one SMS step. It is not a property of the contact, the workflow as a whole, or the phone number.
When a reply comes in, Revamp365 looks at the last text that workflow sent to that person, and reads the setting off that step. So:
- If only step 3 has the toggle on and step 5 was the last text sent, nothing hands off.
- The same contact can hand off from one workflow and not from another.
- A contact who has texted you many times before may suddenly trigger a handoff the first time a workflow with the toggle on happens to be the last thing that texted them.
Turning it on for every text in the workflow removes the guesswork, which is why the app offers to do it.
All the conditions that have to line up
A handoff only happens when every one of these is true:
| Condition | Detail |
|---|---|
| Right number | The reply has to come back to the same number that workflow texted from. |
| Inside the window | The workflow's last text to them has to be within the past 7 days. |
| Toggle plus agent | That text's step has the toggle on and an agent selected. |
| A written text | The step has to be one where you wrote the message. Steps already handled by an AI agent are not eligible. |
| Not already handed off | This run of the workflow has not handed this contact off before. |
| No human in the thread | Nobody has texted the thread by hand since the workflow's last message. |
A STOP or HELP reply never reaches any of this — it goes down the opt-out path instead. See mark a contact DNC and understand STOP opt-outs.
A stopped campaign still hands off
A workflow does not have to be running for the handoff to fire. A campaign that has already stopped, or run to the end, still hands the reply over.
That is deliberate rather than a bug. The single most likely moment for someone to reply is to the last text of a campaign — by which point the campaign is finished for them. If the handoff needed a live campaign, the most valuable reply you get would be the one nobody answers.
The practical consequence: after the last text goes out, that campaign keeps a live claim on the conversation for 7 days, counted from that last text.
Two limits, added 28 August 2026
One handoff per run. Before this change, every reply inside the 7-day window started a brand new agent conversation, so one finished campaign could spawn several. Now a given run of a workflow hands a contact over once and once only.
Re-enrolling the contact in that workflow starts a new run, and a new run legitimately re-arms the handoff. That is the supported way to get another one.
A human takeover ends the claim. If a person texts the thread by hand after the workflow's last message, no handoff happens — the agent will not talk over someone who is already handling the lead. The campaign still pauses on their reply, which is protective either way. Texts sent by automations, campaigns, and agents do not count as a takeover; only ones typed by a person.
What happens on the replies after the first one
Once the handoff has happened:
- If the agent conversation is still open, the agent keeps answering. Nothing new is started because nothing needs to be.
- If the agent conversation has already finished, later replies inside the window do not start a fresh one. The run's single handoff has been spent.
If you want an agent watching that thread indefinitely, assign the agent to the contact directly rather than relying on a workflow's handoff.
A worked example
A contact was enrolled in a workflow by hand at 6:40 PM. The step-1 text went out immediately, they replied about fifteen seconds later, and the campaign stopped twenty-four seconds after it started — the reply arrived before the campaign had done anything else.
Two days later they texted the same number again. Under the old behavior that reply started a second, separate agent conversation, because the 7-day window was still open. Under the current behavior it does not: the run already had its one handoff. If that first agent conversation is still live it answers; if it finished, the reply lands in your inbox for you to pick up.
If a handoff did not fire
Work down the conditions table above, in this order:
- Open the contact's Timeline and find the workflow's last outbound text. Was it sent from the same number they replied to, and was it inside the last 7 days?
- Open that workflow's Cadence step and check the setting on that text specifically — not on the workflow generally.
- Check the agent dropdown on that step is filled in.
- Check nobody on your team texted the thread by hand after that message.
- Check whether this run already handed off. The timeline shows an AI Agent enrolled row when it does.
None of this appears on the Automations Logs tab — workflows and AI agents are separate engines with no log page of their own. See why the Automations Logs tab doesn't show everything that ran, and who did this? reading the actor label for telling the two apart on the timeline.
Related: build an SMS drip sequence and use the contact timeline.