This article will guide you step-by-step to get your AI Agent setup and deployed in just minutes.

Hugo is a next-generation AI support agent solution, fully integrated with Crisp.

While conversational at its core, Hugo goes beyond answering questions. He understands customer intent and context to proactively guide users toward resolution — just like a human support agent.

Built to autonomously handle a large share of incoming conversations, Hugo can also perform real actions through your integrations, such as checking account details, tracking orders, or issuing refunds, always within the rules you define.

By engaging proactively and providing concrete guidance, Hugo helps resolve issues faster and frees up your team to focus on complex cases.

Haven't met Hugo yet? Check out official resources

Setting up Hugo

To get started, head over to Crisp and hit ⚡️ AI Agent from the main menu on the left.

In order to get Hugo and up and running, just a few things are needed:

• Configuring Hugo's identity and settings
• Importing some resources to train it for your use-case
• Providing it with some guidance (our instructions and routing rules)

Let's go through them step-by-step and share a few good practices to help you along the way.

Step 1 - Configuration

Inside Hugo, navigate to Agent > Settings. It's an important step to help the AI Agent familiarize itself with the business and services it provides.

1. First off, we must configure the AI Agent's identity

You can start by uploading an avatar (which users will see when interacting with it) and it's name.

2. This next step is crucial: we must specify a business description.

You'll want to provide an introduction to your business, just as if you were describing it online to a new audience unfamiliar with it yet.

✔ Example of an efficient business description:

We are « The Cookie Factory » (cookiefactory.com), an artisan consumer food brand specializing in freshly baked cookies made in small batches using high-quality ingredients.
Our brand emphasizes craftsmanship, freshness, and thoughtful presentation over mass production.

Products range includes classic staples and rotating seasonal recipes, with optional personalization for events, gifts, and celebrations.

We sell directly to consumers through our online store (thecookiefactory.shop) and via our physical flagship store in San Francisco.
We offer worldwide shipping as well as in-store pickup.

3. Finish up the configuration in that menu based on your preference

• Enable the data sources you wish Hugo to use
• Enable the default escalation rules when the Hugo doesn't have an answer or thinks the user might be getting frustrated
• Choose the delay after which Hugo should auto-resolve the conversation if the user didn't follow up to its response
• Configure your office hours, if you wish Hugo to be aware of them when users request escalation, or if you wish to only start Hugo when your support is unavailable

Step 2 - Importing training resources

We now need to provide Hugo with data and resources to help him accurately answer your customer's questions.

In Hugo, head over to the Train section.

1. Question & Answers allow you to create short snippets

Snippets are an essentials source of information for your AI Agent, use them without moderation.

They should contain two information: a question (the title/context of your snippet) and its answer (similarly to a short article).

2. Import your website content

Hugo can crawl your website to extract and learn from its content. Simply specify your URL, start the import, and let Hugo ingest everything while you keep configuring everything else

You can also specify a filter when importing your website, this can be useful if you wish to ignore certain pages and restrict Hugo to only the content that truly matters for better relevancy.

3. You can also optionally import file resources

Hugo accepts 3 different formats: CSV, PDF and TXT files.

4. Hugo is also automatically trained on your Crisp knowledge base, whenever you create, delete or update an article.

Feel free to take the time to progressively build one, this is one of the most valuable source of information for your AI Agent.

Step 3 - Providing Guidance to Hugo

Guidances are the instructions (behavioural prompts) we give Hugo to personalize the way it replies to users, and where we configure routing actions for certain situations.

1. Navigate to Guidance > Instructions to create your first instruction.

Instructions are where you prompt the behaviour Hugo should adopt when replying to your customers and handling certain situations, this is essentially the AI's playbook it will follow at all times.

To create one, simply name it and write down your prompt.

2. (Optional) We can now also create our first routing action in Guidance > Routing

Routing actions are used when you wish Hugo to perform a specific task when it encounters certain situations. It can for instance be used to automatically escalate conversations when users are inquiring about quality issues with your products, or start a workflow when they request a marketing partnership.

To create one, simply name your rule, describe the situation (a topic, an emotion...), and select the desired action you wish Hugo to execute.

Ready to get started?

We of course recommend that you keep on training your AI Agent with additional resources and explore the additional configuration settings.

Once this is done, and you feel ready to test and deploy Hugo, you can simply follow those final couple of steps.

1. Head over to Evaluate > Playground to test Hugo for yourself

You can easily create and reset new conversations to ask different questions as your users would, and understand the area of improvements required on your end (new training resources, additional instructions...)

You are also able to experiment with different AI models to see which one best fits your use-case.

2. Once ready, go to Agent > Activation to deploy Hugo live

• Tick the Enable agent for new conversation option
• Select your default target ("Answer with AI Agent" for Hugo to automatically handle conversations)
• Optionally choose specific conversations channels Hugo should exclusively handle (everything else will automatically be attributed to human agents instead)

Navigating the Hugo interface

Let's now draw a map of the Hugo interface to better understand how each part connect to the other, and get an overview of the different configurations possible.

Evaluate

• Playground → Quickly test your AI Agent and easily compare models
• Analyics → Allows you to get insights on all AI behaviours (conversations handled, escalated, workflows triggered, topics encountered...)

Agent

• Activate → To activate Hugo and decide how it should handle incoming conversations
• Settings → All settings related to Hugo, ranging from its identity, model, sources to use, escalation handling...

Guidance

• Instructions → Instructions are the prompts you feed the AI with to fine-tune its behaviour (tone, context, expectations...)
• Routing → Describe a situation or topic, and decide what Hugo should do when it encounters it (starting a workflow, escalating to a human...)

Train

• Questions & Answers → Create Questions/Answer snippets which the AI will use as its personal FAQ when answering common requests
• Web pages → Crawl and import the content of your different websites, which the AI will be able to use as a resource
• Files → Import additional training content as either TXT, CSV or PDF

Automate

• Topic Detection → Describes topics that you would like to track in the Analytics, to get more insights on what your customers inquire about
• Workflows Builder → Create your own custom workflows which the AI can then trigger through your "Routing" rules
• Integrations & MCP → MCPs are the "tools" of AIs. Hugo offers native integration, but also allows you to connect to your own internal systems

Now with all that in mind, you're ready to continue strengthening your Hugo implementation!

Next steps

If you expected things to end here, we may still have a few more surprises before letting you go...

Below you will find an introduction to some of the other features shipped with Hugo 🤖

Topics & Analytics

Hugo is able to evaluate the topic of any conversation initiated by your customers. This allows you to monitor the type of conversations handled in your inbox, how Hugo handled them, and easily get insights on the amount of conversations it deflected and resolved for you.

This is also a great way to spot topics generating high volumes of conversations or identify areas of improvements in your setup and training resources provided.

Build Workflows

Hugo is also able to start workflows (formerly known as "scenarios") to achieve various use-cases such as collecting information, booking meetings and demo requests, offering different choices to your users, and much (much) more.

Workflows can also hand the conversation back to Hugo once their flow has been completed.

Explore integrations & MCP

By now, you understand why Hugo is an AI Agent, not just a chatbot: he can analyze conversations, understand text, images, and audio, make decisions, and know when to reply, route, or escalate — just like a human agent. Except... Hugo can also use tools 🛠️

In a nutshell, MCP are to AI Agents what your back-office is to your human agents.

They allow you to automate and delegate some of the most repetitive, time-consuming support tasks, while keeping full control over what the AI can and cannot do.

Crisp exposes various native ones with our different integrations (Stripe, Shopify, Woocommerce, Status Page...) but also allows you to easily and securely build your own, and connect it to Hugo.

Frequently Asked Questions

Still have some questions which were not covered above? Perhaps you'll find our answer in this FAQ.

If your question does not figure here, share it with us directly by chat, we'll be available to assist you

Which AI models does Hugo use?

Hugo actually supports several models:

• OpenAI (with GPT 5 and GPT 5.1)
• Anthropic (Claude Sonnet and Claude Haiku)
• Mistral Lage and Medium
• Google Gemini 3
• Internal Crisp model (hosted in France, for companies working under stricter internal policies and requiring safe compliance with EU regulations)

Updated on: 02/02/2026