This article explains how Hugo Topics work and how to use them to understand the conversations your AI Agent handles.

Hugo is a next-generation AI support agent, 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

Watch the Topics walkthrough

If you prefer a quick visual walkthrough, this video shows how to create Hugo Topics, write better topic descriptions, and use them to understand what your customers ask the most.

Hugo Topics

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.

How to create a Topic?

To get started, head over to Crisp, hit ️ AI Agent from the main menu on the left and go to Automate → Topic detection → New topic.

How to take advantage of Topics?

Simply name your topic concisely, and prompt Hugo with a description of the topic/situation it should detect. Whenever Hugo is handling a conversation, it will evaluate your topics to see if the user's request matches any of them.

✔ Example of a good topic description:

The customer expresses negative feedback or dissatisfaction about:
- Our cookies (e.g. cookies not matching quality expectations, or issues with taste, texture or freshness)
- Shipping and delivery issues (e.g. missing or damaged goods, late delivery, lost package...)
- Poor customer service experience (e.g. frustration about our refund policies or the help they received)

Similarly to Routing, topic descriptions should be detailed and precisely describe the situations you wish Hugo to detect.

Use segments to improve routing

You can also choose to automatically assign a segment when a topic is detected.

Segments are simple labels you can attach to contacts or conversations in Crisp. In this case, they help you turn a detected topic into a reusable condition for your routing rules.

For example, if Hugo detects a Billing topic, you can automatically assign a billing segment to the conversation. Then, you can use this segment in your routing setup to move the conversation to the right inbox, team, or workflow.

This is useful when you want Hugo to classify a conversation first, then let your routing rules decide what should happen next.

To learn more about routing, you can read this guide: How does Hugo Routing work?

Understand Topics performance with Analytics

Defining topics is only the first step. To truly understand their impact, you can track how they perform over time using Hugo Analytics.

By analyzing your topics, you can:

• Identify which topics generate the most conversations
• Spot recurring issues affecting your users
• Measure how well Hugo handles each type of request

This helps you continuously improve your setup by refining your training, instructions, or workflows based on real data.

Learn how to analyze your Topics in Hugo Analytics

Updated on: 15/05/2026