Release notes for Acai Desk, the email-first help desk for travel teams, built natively on Microsoft 365. Newest first.

Jump to a quarter

• Q4 2026 — October to December
• Q3 2026 — July to September

Q4 2026

Date ranges, a configurable inbox, and auto-replies

2 October 2026 · Added

A week of changes requested from the floor: filtering by departure date, choosing what a ticket row shows, and rules that can answer an email.

Date ranges in views and rules

Date custom fields — a departure date, say — gain "is between" and "is in a relative range", including forward-looking ranges: Tomorrow, Next 24 hours, Next 48 hours, Next 72 hours, Next 7 or 30 days, next week and next month. A view stores the range, not the dates, so "departing in the next 48 hours" is still right tomorrow. Created date gains the same presets, and a new Received date filters on the last email in. Created and Received offer only past ranges. Rules can use the same date conditions.

A "Received" quick filter

The Filter menu on any list has a Received filter — Today, Last 7 days, This week, or a custom range — measured in your workspace's timezone. Inside a view it narrows the view.

Choose what My Work rows show

In Settings → General → Ticket list, admins choose what each ticket shows in My Work (Open, Waiting and Closed) for everyone: status, priority, SLA warning, assignee and tags, each on or off, plus up to three custom fields as chips. Changes apply when you press Save Changes. Views, mailboxes and the SLA lists keep the standard row. Ticket rows also show the time for anything in the last 48 hours.

Rules that send an email reply

A new rule action sends a real email reply — an out-of-hours response, for example — with a template and signature. It replies at most once per ticket per rule, does not reply to automated mail, and does not count as your first response.

SLA targets on a departure date

An SLA target can now use a relative range on a date custom field, measured from the day the ticket's clock started.

Rules pick the contact and company

"Contact is" and "Company is" now open a search instead of taking typed text, so renaming a contact or company no longer breaks a rule. Rules already saved with the old fields still work.

Forwarding with templates and signatures

Forward by email now works like New Ticket: your default signature is in the note when it opens, and "Use template" and the signature switcher sit next to Attach. The sending mailbox's signature goes out above the forwarded thread.

Composer AI writes as it goes

Draft reply, Improve and Summarize for handoff now stream into the editor as the answer arrives, and finish as soon as it is complete. Before, they could leave a spinner and a locked composer for up to two minutes. You can stop a run with the button or Escape and keep what has arrived, and one undo restores your text from before the run. Improve now rewrites only what you typed — your signature stays — keeps your language and facts, and never adds a greeting or sign-off.

AI buttons say why they cannot run

When the copilot is not available to you, its buttons show a lock and a tooltip with the next step, instead of failing when clicked. A real failure now shows the actual reason.

Smaller fixes

• Sorting by priority orders by severity — it was alphabetical. Views sorted by priority reorder.
• The activity feed names custom fields ("updated Departure date") instead of an internal key.
• Validation errors say what was wrong instead of "Validation failed".
• Long filter menus scroll instead of running off the screen.

Q3 2026

AI-Lite for rules, and one word per thing

25 September 2026 · Added

Rules can now act on what a ticket is about, not only on its fields, and the app calls people and organisations by one name each.

AI-Lite: rules that read the ticket

AI-Lite reads each new ticket and records its intent, language, sentiment and urgency, plus any booking reference it finds. Rules can then use those as conditions. It runs on your own OpenAI API key, configured in Settings — no request to Acai needed. Until a key is configured, the AI-Lite conditions show in the rule editor locked, with a tooltip saying why.

AI usage and cost on the Analytics page

The Analytics page now shows AI-Lite usage and its estimated cost for your workspace.

Rules: safer tags, active by default

Rule actions now refer to tags by identity rather than by name, so renaming or deleting a tag no longer creates a duplicate. New rules start Active.

"Contact" and "Company", everywhere

The app used "Traveler", "Contact" and "Customer" for the same record, and "Customer" sometimes meant a company. It now says Contact for a person and Company for an organisation, in the sidebar, ticket panel, activity feed ("Contact replied"), composer, filters, search, SLA copy and Analytics. Nothing about the data changed — only the words.

SLA rules: a narrower condition set

An SLA target is chosen once, when a ticket arrives. Status, Assignee, Team, Mailbox and Created date cannot do useful work at that moment, so they are no longer offered in SLA rules. Rules select on Priority, Tags, Contact and custom fields, plus the company the target applies to. Saved views keep every one of these filters.

Connecting a new mailbox imports the last 7 days

The first sync of a newly connected mailbox now imports the 100 most recently active conversations from the last 7 days. Previously it tried to import 30 days in one go, and on a busy mailbox that could fail without importing anything. Older mail is not imported. After the first sync, every new email arrives as before.

Mailbox permissions, corrected

Connecting a Microsoft 365 mailbox with your own app registration needs Mail.ReadWrite as well as Mail.Read and Mail.Send. Sending a reply creates a draft first, and that needs ReadWrite. The setup form now says so. If you connected a mailbox this way before, check that the permission is granted.

Copilot chat that remembers

17 September 2026 · Improved

Copilot conversations now persist, they stay attached to the ticket they belong to, and saved views sort the way the rest of the inbox does.

Chats survive logout, a closed tab and a restart

One chat per ticket per agent, kept server-side. Closing the tab, logging out, or coming back the next day no longer loses the conversation. Only the reference to the chat is stored on the ticket — never the conversation itself.

Unsent drafts survive switching tickets

A question typed into the copilot but not yet sent is still there when you come back to that ticket.

Chats stay with the right ticket

Opening a ticket and switching to another before the first chat finished loading could show the first ticket's conversation in the second ticket's panel, and allow sending into it. A chat is now only shown on the ticket it belongs to.

Saved views sort by last received

Saved views were still ordered by when a ticket was created, so a customer's fresh reply on an older ticket never rose to the top. Saved views now sort by the last email received, like My Work and mailboxes already did. Existing views on the old default move to the new order — a view where someone explicitly chose another sort keeps it.

Ticket rows show the time they are sorted by

List rows used to show when a ticket was last updated, which made a correctly sorted list look out of order. Rows now show when the last email arrived, with the full date and time on hover, on every ticket list.

Companies, SLAs and a safer copilot

12 September 2026 · Added

Four changes in one week, two of which change how your existing data behaves.

Companies now detect themselves

Company records used to be a table someone had to fill in by hand. They now populate themselves from email domains.

• A company can claim many email domains, replacing the single free-text domain
• Travelers link automatically on intake, matched by their email domain, and the company is created when nothing claims that domain yet
• Guarded against noise — a free-mail blocklist, and a guard against your own mailbox domains
• The free-text company field is retired, replaced by a company picker on the traveler record
• Your existing data is backfilled — no manual re-entry

SLA targets and breach flagging

Until now a ticket going overdue was nothing happening, and nothing reacted to it. SLAs give you a time-elapsed trigger.

• Configurable targets at three scopes: a workspace default, a per-company target, and conditional rules built on the same conditions your views already use
• A business-hours-aware clock — the target only burns during your desk's working hours
• Specificity-first resolution — a conditional rule beats a workspace default regardless of priority; priority only breaks ties
• Breaches surfaced in the inbox, flagged where agents already look

Notification and escalation beyond the mirrored tag are not in scope yet.

Copilot: clearer and safer

• Plain-language tool status — the copilot says what it is doing instead of exposing raw tool internals
• Tool-call payloads are redacted at the API and no longer reach the browser
• A multiline composer, with room to write a real question
• Markdown renders properly in AI results and in Integration API message bodies

Automation settings, in one place

Routing rules and handling rules are now managed from a single Automation area in Settings, instead of two separate pages.

Mailboxes, roles and recipients

4 September 2026 · Improved

• Ingestion reads every mailbox folder, not just the Inbox. If you run server-side Outlook rules that file mail out of the Inbox, those messages now reach Acai Desk.
• Role sync with your identity provider — changes flow both ways.
• Add a note when forwarding — an editable message above the forwarded thread.
• Recipient autocomplete — in reply, forward and new ticket.
• One-click schedule upload — the workbook uploads in a single step.

Polish and reliability

28 August 2026 · Improved

• Ticket status on the conversation-list row — see the state without opening the ticket.
• A live indicator while the copilot is streaming — you can tell it is still working.
• Clearer automation wording — the rule editor says "ticket", and the suggestion action is now labelled research.

Automation moves to Acai

20 August 2026 · Improved

Rule storage and execution now live in Acai rather than in Acai Desk.

• Intake routing runs on Acai's case routing — labels arrive as tags, and the destination as a custom field.
• Acai Desk's own routing-rules engine is retired — Acai owns both the rules and their execution.
• Handling rules are managed from Settings → Automation, without leaving Acai Desk.
• A rebuilt rule editor — conditions as filter chips, a field picker that knows your tags and custom fields, type-aware value inputs, and intent suggestions.
• Failed logins are attributed to the tenant that started them — an audit-log correctness fix.

Templates, signatures and coverage

15 August 2026 · Added

• Response templates — a shared library plus your own personal one, managed in Settings and inserted from either composer.
• Outbound mail carries the mailbox display name — replies show the mailbox's name in the From header rather than the raw address.
• Multiple signatures per agent — keep several and pick one per message, in-body.
• Schedule template rework — an Instructions tab, styled sheets, dropdowns, and holiday date-time ranges.
• Member avatars — pulled from your identity provider, with initials as a fallback.
• Hourly backlog sweep — tickets that arrive while nobody is on shift are distributed automatically when agents come on.

Acai Desk is here

7 August 2026 · Added

An email-first help desk for travel teams, built natively on Microsoft 365. It turns your inbound mail into tracked tickets, with an AI copilot on every one of them.

Everything below is the initial feature set, not a list of changes.

Email and mailboxes

• Native Microsoft 365 connection — inbound mail becomes threaded, tracked tickets automatically
• Multiple mailboxes per workspace, each with its own access grants
• Pick which mailbox you send from when creating a ticket
• Attachments in both directions
• Full recipient control: editable To on replies, CC and BCC on new tickets, and per-message To/CC/BCC history
• Forward a ticket to any recipient, attachments included

The inbox

• Sorted by latest activity, with infinite scroll
• A message panel with per-message cards, an inline composer and a pinned-note bar
• Send and receive date and time on every message
• A rich-text composer for replies, notes and new tickets
• Send as <status> — reply and set the ticket's state in one action
• Agent-initiated outbound tickets
• Custom shared views, saved per team or per person
• Editable tags and custom fields, each with its own detail view
• Full-text search across subject and body in English and Spanish, plus search by case number
• A type-ahead assignee picker

Travelers and companies

• Traveler and company profiles as first-class records, with drill-down to their tickets

Teams, routing and coverage

• Teams with a detail view — rename, add and remove members
• Routing rules for inbound mail
• Schedule-aware auto-assignment: agent schedules, timezones and availability decide who gets what
• Schedule import and export by workbook — per-agent upsert, a CLEAR keyword, and a download of your current schedule

Analytics

• Volume and quality metrics, filterable by customer and by agent
• Service-level reporting: per-company targets and retrospective compliance

AI

• An AI copilot on every ticket — streaming responses, human-in-the-loop approval, optional auto-approve
• First-party Acai AI-agent integration

Admin and security

• Single sign-on, multi-tenant isolation and role-based access control
• Member and team management in Settings
• An impersonation audit log