Key Takeaways
- HighLevel's AI Agent workflow action can read every inbound email and tag the contact as a support ticket, customer, prospect, spam, or high priority.
- It runs off the Inbound Email trigger, so your Gmail or Outlook has to be connected through Email Two-Way Sync first.
- Give the agent a fixed list of tags and tell it to use only those. Otherwise you get "support" on one contact and "support ticket" on the next.
- Two tools do most of the work: Add Contact Tag and Add Task.
- Smart lists on the Contacts page turn those tags into a sorted view you check once a day.
You get back to the truck after a job and there are 31 new emails. Three are spam. Two are vendors. One is a customer who needs help today. And one is a new lead who also emailed two of your competitors. Which one do you open first? Most owners I talk to just start at the top. In a recent HighLevel "Did You Know" tutorial, Andrew from the HighLevel Content Army shows how to let an AI agent do that sorting inside the CRM. We set up Go High Level San Jose and Bay Area businesses from our shop in Los Gatos, so here's how the build works and what we'd check before trusting it.
What the AI Agent Action Does
The AI Agent action is a step you drop into a HighLevel workflow. It takes in whatever triggered the workflow, reads it, and then uses tools you hand it. In this build the trigger is an email and the tool is a tag.
Andrew's example sorts email into five buckets: support tickets, customers, prospects, spam, and high attention emails that need a person. An email lands, the agent reads the subject and body, picks one bucket, and tags the contact. You don't chat with it. It just runs in the background.
Step One: Get Your Email Into HighLevel
None of this works if your email isn't flowing into the CRM. In HighLevel, go to Settings, then My Profile, and scroll to Email Two-Way Sync. That's where you connect Gmail or Outlook. Once it's connected, anything sent to that address shows up in the contact's conversation.
Then create a workflow and add the Inbound Email trigger. You can filter it by which mailbox the email was sent to, specific people, CCs, the subject line, whether it has attachments, and tags. Andrew keeps it simple and filters to his main inbox. You can also limit it to new conversations only.
Step Two: Write the Instructions
Add the AI Agent action and type what you want in plain words. His version is one sentence: segment my emails into support tickets, customers, prospects, spam, and high attention emails I need to respond to.
Then hit Enhance Prompt. HighLevel rewrites that one line into a full set of instructions. After that, insert the email itself. Under the inbound email values, pick the full body and the subject and label each one, so the agent knows what it's reading. Run Enhance Prompt once more and it places those fields where they belong.
You also pick the model. The action offers models from GPT, Anthropic, and Google, plus an effort level.
Step Three: Give It Tools and a Short Leash
Instructions alone don't change anything in your CRM. Tools do. Click Add Tool, choose Add Contact Tag, and let the agent fill in the value.
Here's the part people skip. List your exact tags in the prompt and tell the agent, in Andrew's words, to only use one of these and not make its own. Without that line, the tags drift and your lists stop matching.
There are more tools if you want them. The agent can assign the contact to a user, send an email back, create an opportunity, or add a task. Andrew recommends keeping it simple: tags, plus Add Task so someone on your team gets a to-do when an email needs a reply. Save and publish.
Step Four: Build the Smart Lists
Tags are only useful if you can see them. On the Contacts page, filter by one of the tags, say high priority, apply it, and save it as a smart list. Do that for each bucket. Now you log in each morning and the high priority people are sitting in one list, prospects in another, support in a third.
If you want to go further and pull details out of those emails into contact fields, we covered that in using AI to extract data from lead emails.
Why This Matters for Bay Area and San Jose Businesses
Most of the owners we work with around San Jose answer their own email, and they do it between jobs. The lead that comes in at 2pm gets read at 8pm, under a pile of supplier promos. Around here that customer has other options a tap away, and the first business to answer usually gets the job.
Sorting isn't the same as answering. But it changes what you see first. A prospect list with two names in it gets handled. An inbox with 31 unread messages gets put off. That's the reason we like this build for a Go High Level San Jose setup: it's small, it's cheap to run, and it points you at the money first.
Practical Steps
- Connect your main inbox under Settings, My Profile, Email Two-Way Sync.
- Decide your buckets on paper before you open the workflow builder. Five is plenty.
- Create the tags first, spelled exactly how you want them.
- Build the workflow: Inbound Email trigger, then the AI Agent action with your instructions, the email subject and body, and the tag list.
- Add the Add Contact Tag and Add Task tools. Hold off on letting it send replies until you trust the sorting.
- Send yourself five test emails, one per bucket, from an outside address. Check that each contact got the right tag.
- Build one smart list per tag and check the high priority and prospect lists first every day.
- Look over the tags once a week for the first month. If it keeps getting one type wrong, tighten the instructions.
Watch the Full HighLevel Tutorial
Credit to Andrew and the HighLevel Content Army for the walkthrough.
Final Thoughts
This is a six minute tutorial and maybe a half hour build. What you get is an inbox that tells you who to answer first. Start with tags and tasks, test it with real emails, and add the fancier tools later.
On Point Tech Solutions is a Go High Level consultant in Los Gatos serving San Jose and the Bay Area. We can build this for you, or teach your team with an SOP so they can run it. Either way you own what we build. Start at optechsol.llc.