How to Set AI Business Hours: Reply Only When You Want To

Your AI does not get tired. That is mostly a good thing. But it also does not know that 7pm on Thursday is when your store closes, or that Friday afternoon is half-day, or that Sunday is your one day off. Until last week, every Botline tenant's AI replied at all hours — quoting prices, taking orders, making promises — and the inbox surprises started landing on Monday morning.

The new AI reply schedule draws a fence. Inside the fence, the AI works exactly like it always has. Outside the fence, you pick one of three behaviors: keep replying, send a friendly fixed away message with a “back tomorrow at 9am” tag, or stay completely silent and let the message wait in the inbox until you open the dashboard.

This guide walks through where the schedule lives, the three outside-hours modes, and a few patterns we have seen tenants use successfully.

It is on the same tab as the rest of your AI controls — Settings → AI Configuration — inside a card called AI reply behavior. The card has two sections:

• Reply mode on the left (auto-send, draft for review, confidence-based) — unchanged from before.
• Schedule on the right — the new feature.

The schedule is OFF by default. When it is off, AI replies 24/7 — exactly the same as before. Flip the toggle on and the per-day editor appears.

Each weekday gets its own row. By default Mon–Fri are 09:00–18:00, Saturday 10:00–14:00, Sunday closed — but you can edit anything:

The little ↓ next to a row copies that day's hours to every other enabled day — useful when you want Monday's window to apply to all weekdays without retyping.

Toggling a day off (the switch at the start of the row) marks it as closed entirely. Customers messaging you on that day are treated as “outside hours.”

Same as having the schedule off — AI replies all day. Pick this if you want the schedule visible but not yet enforced (useful while you tune your hours).

This is the most common choice for SME tenants. The customer sends a message at 7pm. Your AI replies once with a friendly note like:

The {{NEXT_OPEN_LABEL}} token in your template auto-fills based on the next open window — “today at 9am” if it's 6am Tuesday, “tomorrow at 9am” if it's 7pm Tuesday, “Monday at 9am” if it's Saturday afternoon and Sunday is closed.

The customer gets at most one away message per 6 hours. If they send 12 messages between 7pm and 7:30pm, only the first one triggers the reply; the next 11 are silently absorbed (they do still land in your dashboard inbox — you can reply manually any time).

The strict option. Outside hours, the AI does not reply at all. The customer's message lands in your inbox and waits for you. No one gets pinged at 11pm; no AI reply goes out without your eyes on it.

Pick this when:

• Your business is high-stakes (legal, medical, financial) and an AI mis-quote at 2am could cost you a client.
• You handle every after-hours message personally first thing in the morning, and you do not want the customer to think they've already been answered.
• You are running an AI agent in a regulated category where automated responses outside business hours have compliance implications.

• SME ecommerce, salons, restaurants, clinics: Send fixed away message with a warm tone. Customers see they've been heard, you don't lose the lead.
• High-volume support inboxes (50+ messages/day): Stay silent to avoid the 6-hour anti-spam window expiring 100 times per night.
• Any business in the first month of an AI rollout: Start with Always reply, watch the after-hours conversations for a week, then switch to Send fixed away message once you've seen enough patterns.

You can flip between modes any time — the new mode applies to the very next inbound message.

The same schedule applies to both your WhatsApp and Instagram DMs. There is no separate setting per channel — your business hours are your business hours. Comment replies (Instagram post comments) are handled by your manual approval flow and are not gated by the schedule.