Automation
The Automation page gives you an overview of all running follow-up automations and lets you control them manually.
Overview
At the top of the page, you'll see three stat cards:
- Active Deals — Number of deals with a running follow-up sequence
- Pending Jobs — Number of scheduled, not yet executed follow-up jobs
- Next Job — When the next follow-up is due (with deal name). Click the card to open the details of the affected deal
Data is automatically refreshed in the background every 30 seconds.
Filter: Mine / All Deals
Using the Mine / All toggle in the header, you can choose which deals are displayed:
- Mine (default) — Shows only your own deals, i.e. deals assigned to your user
- All — Shows all deals across the entire team/tenant
Your selection is saved and automatically restored on your next visit.
Use the "Mine" filter to focus on your own deals without being distracted by other team members' deals.
Deal Table
The table shows all deals with active automation, sorted by the next follow-up date (earliest first):
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Deal | Title of the Pipedrive deal |
| Person | Linked contact person |
| User | Assigned user (only visible in "All" mode) |
| Track | Automation track: Customer or Supplier with domain (e.g. "Supplier (supplier.com)") — see below |
| Status | Current automation status (see below) |
| Step | Current follow-up step in the sequence |
| Next Follow-up | Scheduled time for the next follow-up |
Dual-Track: Customer and Supplier
A deal can have one customer track and multiple supplier tracks simultaneously. Each supplier is identified by their email domain — an independent track runs per domain.
- A deal can appear with multiple rows in the table (one per track)
- Each track has its own status, step, and next follow-up date
- Actions like Stop only affect the respective track — the others continue running
- Block affects the entire deal (all tracks)
- Supplier tracks are displayed in the Track column with their domain (e.g. "Supplier (supplier.com)")
The track is automatically determined based on the recipient of the original activity:
- Customer: The recipient is the contact person linked to the deal
- Supplier: The recipient is another external address (e.g. a supplier in CC). The track is assigned to the recipient's domain (e.g.
supplier:supplier.com) - Internal: All recipient domains belong to the own organization (→ no automation, see Email Blacklist)
If you later change the participants of a running supplier activity, for example to another contact at the same supplier, the next follow-ups go to the new participants; step and date stay. Such a change starts no new track, not even for another supplier. Create a new activity for that.
Email Linking with Pipedrive
When an Outlook connection is active, follow-up emails are automatically displayed in the Email tab of the Pipedrive deal. Vita-Drive.Ai uses Pipedrive's Smart BCC for this: on every send, the deal-specific BCC address is automatically added so that Pipedrive can associate the email with the correct deal.
This works in both direct send and draft mode (the BCC address is added to the draft).
Email Threading
A follow-up ties in with the latest email with the recipient. That means the recipient's company, or for a freemail address such as gmail.com the address itself. It goes out as a real reply only when Vita-Drive.Ai knows the email it replies to. Otherwise it is a new email with "Re:" in the subject, and not every email program shows it in the same conversation.
The email it replies to is:
- for the first follow-up, the latest email with the recipient in the deal. Vita-Drive.Ai looks for it in your Outlook mailbox. If it is not there, for example because a colleague wrote it from their own mailbox, the follow-up becomes a new email.
- for every further follow-up, your last follow-up to the recipient. If you sent the draft in Outlook, Vita-Drive.Ai notices at its next check of the drafts, within 30 minutes. If Vita-Drive.Ai sent it itself, the latest email with the recipient in the deal applies again.
For deals with a great many emails, Vita-Drive.Ai reads the 1,000 emails Pipedrive returns first.
Whether the latest email with the recipient is quoted below the text is decided by the switch Quoted history in the app settings. It is off by default.
If the deal holds no email with the recipient yet, the follow-up becomes a new email without quoted history, even when the deal holds emails with other parties. A follow-up to the customer therefore never quotes the correspondence with a supplier, and the reverse.
A new draft replaces the open one
When a new draft or email is written for a follow-up while the previous draft is still open, Vita-Drive.Ai deletes the previous one only once the new one exists. When no new draft comes of the step, the previous one stays the open draft.
If the previous draft cannot be deleted, it stays in your Outlook "Drafts" folder, and the activity log shows Old draft not deleted. Vita-Drive.Ai no longer tracks it then. Delete it yourself so that it is not sent by mistake.
How replies are detected
Every two minutes, Vita-Drive.Ai looks for new emails that may be a reply to a follow-up:
- Pipedrive inbox: the inbox Pipedrive synchronizes for the owner of your organization. This source is always active.
- Outlook inbox of the other members: if the operator has switched it on for your organization, Vita-Drive.Ai also reads the Outlook inbox of every other member of your organization with a connected Outlook account. This way, replies that reach these users are detected as well. What is read is described under Connect Outlook.
If an email arrives in both sources, for example because the owner was in copy, it is processed only once.
Which deal a reply belongs to
When Vita-Drive.Ai detects a real reply, it collects the candidate deals with a running automation: deals where the sender is the contact person or the recipient of the follow-ups, and the deal Pipedrive linked the email conversation to. Which of them stops is decided in this order:
- Pipedrive linked the conversation to one of these deals: that deal only. Exception: if the subject contains the order number of another candidate deal but not the one of the linked deal, the subject decides as in 3.
- Only one deal is a candidate: that deal, whatever the subject says.
- Several deals: the deal whose order number appears in the subject. The order number is the first word of the deal title if it is at least four characters long and contains a digit. Titles without an order number are matched by keywords from the title. If the subject matches several deals, all of them stop.
- Several deals, and the subject matches none: nothing is stopped. Otherwise a supplier with many deals would end all of its automations with a single email. In this case, stop the right automation yourself.
Emails from an Outlook inbox have not been linked to a deal by Pipedrive; rules 2 to 4 apply to them.
Status Values
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Customer: Follow-up | Activity was classified as a customer inquiry, follow-up sequence is running |
| Supplier: Follow-up | Activity was classified as a supplier inquiry |
| Stopped | Automation was stopped (e.g. by customer reply or manually) |
| Blocked | Deal has been permanently excluded from automation |
Actions per Deal
Via the three-dot menu (...) at the end of each row, you can:
- View details — Opens a side panel with all deal information and the activity log
- Send draft — Only visible when a draft is available (send mode "Create as draft"). Sends the prepared follow-up draft
- Stop — Ends the running follow-up sequence for this deal. Already scheduled jobs will be cancelled
- Block permanently — Permanently excludes the deal from automation. The deal will no longer be processed automatically, even on future scans
Stop vs. Block: A stopped deal is started again by a date change on its source activity, as described below, or by a new activity. A scan alone does not pick it up again. Blocking prevents all of this permanently.
One step per activity
Each step of a sequence runs at most once per track and activity. Vita-Drive.Ai keeps, for each activity, how far the sequence has run on it:
- New activity: the sequence starts at step 1, even if more has run on another activity of the deal.
- Back to an earlier activity: if you edit an activity the follow-up stood on before, it goes on there with the step after the highest that ran on it.
- Sequence run through: once the last step has run on an activity, the sequence stays finished there. A new date, a new time, reopening or any other change starts nothing more on that activity; a follow-up running on another activity carries on there. To keep following up, create a new activity.
This applies to every way a step is planned, restarts and the manual start included. Deliveries are the exception: a new delivery date restarts the reminders on purpose, see Moving the date.
Deliveries: following up before the date
Activities of type Deadline on a supplier track are treated differently from ordinary reminders. The activity's date counts as the delivery date, and the follow-up happens before it rather than on it.
The reason is simple: "are you still on time?" is worthless on the delivery day itself.
How often we follow up depends on how much time is left. Reminders go out 28, 14 and 7 days before the date, as far as those moments are still ahead:
| Time until delivery | Reminders | Count |
|---|---|---|
| 28 days or more | 28, 14 and 7 days before | 3 |
| 14 to 27 days | 14 and 7 days before | 2 |
| 7 to 13 days | 7 days before | 1 |
| 3 to 6 days | 2 days before | 1 |
| less than 3 days | immediately | 1 |
For a delivery on 12 October recorded in August, the drafts appear on 14 September, 28 September and 5 October.
The delivery date is left alone. Unlike ordinary reminders, Vita-Drive.Ai does not rewrite the activity's date here, because it is the information every reminder is derived from.
This holds for every activity of type Deadline, also when Vita-Drive.Ai follows up with the customer on it: the follow-ups go on as usual, only the activity's date stays as it is.
Moving the date
Change the date of the deadline activity in Pipedrive and the schedule is recalculated. More time means more reminders again, less time means fewer.
This also applies to follow-ups that have already stopped: a new date starts them again.
If you turn a running activity into a Deadline afterwards, also set its date to the delivery date. Only a new date switches the follow-up to the schedule above; with the type alone it keeps its previous intervals.
When the supplier names a new date
If the supplier replies, the automation stops as always and a review ticket is created. If the reply names a specific new date, it appears in that ticket.
It is not applied automatically. If it is correct, set the delivery activity to that date and the follow-up schedule will follow by itself.
When automation ends by itself
Besides a customer reply, there are three cases in which a follow-up ends without you doing anything.
The deal is won or lost
As soon as a deal is no longer open in Pipedrive, automation ends for all of its tracks. This applies to won and lost deals alike.
It is checked in two places: immediately when you change the deal, and again right before a follow-up is written. The second check also covers deals owned by a colleague who is not connected to Vita-Drive.Ai.
Reopening a closed deal does not restart automation by itself. Start it again if you need it, see below.
Working on after the close
Often the real work starts once a deal is won: ordering from the supplier, chasing the delivery date, asking the customer about a reorder weeks later.
That still works. What matters is when the activity was created:
- An activity you create after the close starts its automation normally, even on a won or lost deal.
- Follow-ups that were already running when the deal closed end with it.
Create a new activity for this. Editing an old one is not enough, not even if you change its date.
The reason: Vita-Drive.Ai adjusts the dates of existing activities itself, for instance to match your business hours. If such a change counted as a start signal, the system could revive itself.
Whatever you put in the activity's description feeds into the email. Write "ask the customer about a reorder" there and the AI picks it up. It knows the deal is already closed and will not ask about the purchase decision again.
Repeated failures
If a follow-up fails permanently several times in a row, for instance because the mailbox connection is no longer valid, the follow-up stops instead of retrying forever. You will find the reason in the deal's activity history.
If Vita-Drive.Ai cannot read from Pipedrive what a follow-up needs, that is the deal's status, its emails, the activity's description or the files, no draft is written. The step is tried again later: after 15 minutes, after one hour and after four hours, within your business hours like every follow-up. An outage of Pipedrive of a few hours therefore stops nothing. If the fourth attempt fails as well, the follow-up stops, Pipedrive gets the activity "Pruefen: Follow-up konnte nicht erstellt werden", and the activity log shows Follow-up failed, stopped.
A new attempt writes nothing twice. If the draft or email of a step exists already, Vita-Drive.Ai only adds what is still missing, such as the activity in Pipedrive, and creates that once as well.
If Outlook does not answer when sending, it is unclear whether the email went out. Vita-Drive.Ai then sends no second email but checks the draft at the next attempt to see whether it was sent. If it is still a draft, exactly this draft is sent. If you create the draft yourself in the meantime through the Pipedrive panel, nothing is sent: the draft stays a draft in Outlook. If it stays unclear up to the last attempt, the follow-up stops. Check the "Sent Items" folder in Outlook then.
If a step breaks off at the very moment Vita-Drive.Ai hands the email to Outlook, for instance because the server restarts, Vita-Drive.Ai does not know whether a draft or an email came of it. It then writes nothing a second time but stops the follow-up at once, and the activity in Pipedrive asks you to check the "Drafts" and "Sent Items" folders in Outlook.
Supplier without a stored contact
If a supplier track runs without a known supplier address, no email is sent. Instead an activity "Prüfen: Lieferanten-Follow-up ohne Empfänger" is created in Pipedrive and the track stops.
The reason: without a supplier address the email would go to the deal contact, that is, to the customer. The text is written for the supplier but reads plausibly enough that nobody would notice.
Add the supplier as a participant of the source activity, then change its due date. The follow-up then resumes from the current step, addressed to the supplier.
Resuming a Stopped Automation
When an automation has been stopped (e.g. due to a customer reply), you have two options:
Restart the Automation
Change the due date of the source activity in Pipedrive, or just its time. Vita-Drive.Ai detects the change automatically and restarts the follow-up sequence from the current step, at your chosen date. If that step has already run on the activity, it starts with the next one, see One step per activity.
If you marked the source activity as done, reopening it restarts the sequence as well. If its date lies in the past, Vita-Drive.Ai picks the next date itself.
Typical workflow:
- Customer replies → automation stops, "VT Bearbeiten" task is created
- You read the reply and decide: further follow-up needed
- You set the due date of the source activity to the desired date
- Vita-Drive.Ai restarts the sequence automatically on that date
Once the sequence has run through, a new date, a new time or reopening no longer changes anything, also for a stopped automation: it stays finished, and Vita-Drive.Ai writes no further follow-up. A delivery is different: there the reminders follow the new date, see Moving the date. To keep following up after the last step, create a new activity.
Keep the Automation Stopped
Mark the source activity in Pipedrive as done. The automation stays stopped and will not be restarted.
Use the source activity's due date as a control mechanism: change date = restart, mark as done = finish. Other changes to the source activity, such as its subject or note, restart nothing.
Deal Details
The side panel shows:
- Assigned to — The user the deal is assigned to
- Contact data — Person, email, organization
- Automation status — Current status and step
- Timestamps — Next follow-up and last customer reply
- Action buttons — Send draft, Stop, Block
Activity Log
Below the deal information, you'll see a timeline of all automation actions:
| Action | Description |
|---|---|
| Classification | The AI analyzed the activity and assigned a type (e.g. customer inquiry with confidence score) |
| Follow-up generated | A follow-up email was created. The subject line is shown in the timeline |
| Follow-up deferred | The follow-up was postponed (e.g. because a draft hasn't been sent yet) |
| Automatically stopped | The automation was stopped by the system (e.g. customer reply detected) |
| Manually stopped | A user manually stopped the automation |
| VT created | A "VT Bearbeiten" activity was created in Pipedrive. If the customer reply was analyzed by AI, the note contains a summary of the reply (in the customer's language) and optionally a suggested follow-up date |
| Manually started | A user manually started the automation |
| Blocked | The deal was permanently blocked |
| Draft sent | A prepared email draft was sent |
| Old draft not deleted | A new draft replaced the open one, but the old one could not be deleted and is still in Outlook (see A new draft replaces the open one) |
| Error | An error occurred (details are shown in red) |
| Follow-up failed, stopped | The last attempt of a follow-up failed as well, and the follow-up was stopped (see Repeated failures) |
When a customer reply is detected, Vita-Drive.Ai creates a task in Pipedrive with the following note:
Customer replied: "Re: Angebot Softwarelösung"
Summary: Kunde bittet um mehr Zeit zur Prüfung, erwähnt bevorstehenden Urlaub nächste Woche.
Suggested follow-up: 2026-02-28 (+7 days)
Please review and follow up manually.
The summary is written in the customer's language. The suggested follow-up date only appears when the AI detects a time-related hint in the reply (e.g. "next week", "end of the month", vacation mention).
The tasks for a reply go in Pipedrive to whoever owns the track concerned: "VT Bearbeiten" to the user of the stopped track, "Manual Review" (when a reply could not be checked automatically) per deal to the user of the track that was the first candidate. If that user has not connected their Pipedrive account, the task goes, as before, to the user whose account connects Vita-Drive.Ai to Pipedrive.
Manual Scan
Click Scan now to immediately check all due Pipedrive activities. Normally this happens automatically via webhooks and a fallback scan every 4 hours.
Use the manual scan after initial setup to capture existing activities.
Start Deal Manually
Click Manual start above the deal table to start automation for a specific deal:
- Enter the Pipedrive Deal ID (found in the deal's URL in Pipedrive)
- Click Start
Vita-Drive.Ai starts the follow-up sequence for the specified deal, regardless of AI classification.
Manual start skips classification. The follow-up sequence begins at step 1, or after the highest step that has already run on the follow-up's activity. If the sequence has run through there, nothing starts and you see a note; create a new activity instead.