AI overview

ShineCRM AI is a set of features that help you run your business with less manual work. It is part of Suds AI, which you turn on for your organization. Once on, some features run automatically on customer activity, and others you trigger yourself. A separate surface, the MCP server, lets you connect your own Claude account and operate the CRM by chat.

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Turn it on first

Suds AI is off by default. An owner enables it under Settings then Suds AI and accepts a short responsibility attestation. Until then, none of the automatic AI features below run. You can also add custom instructions there to tune how the AI works for your business.

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What it does

Runs automatically (once Suds AI is on): incoming message suggestions, enabled Suds customer reviews and follow-ups, and review request drafting. Paid Starter can also receive call summaries after its first subscription payment and number verification. Existing paid contracts keep their established access. Summaries are available when call recording is on. You trigger it: the message rewriter, and the per-contact AI summary on a contact’s profile.

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How approvals work

Most AI output is a suggestion, not an action. Suggestions appear on the Suds AI page and on the relevant contact and conversation, where you can edit, dismiss, or send them. Pressing Send on a drafted message is the approval: it goes out through your normal scheduled messages queue, usually within a minute. Suds can also send without individual approval when an owner accepts the relevant terms and enables Estimate Follow-ups, Review Follow-ups, or Recurring Service Management. The master switch alone is not enough. Automatic sends have eligibility checks, outreach limits, and a supervisor review. Inactive Customer Finder produces drafts for you to send. Review-request rules under Settings then Reviews also offer hold or auto-send behavior. Review pending messages under Scheduled messages. Turning off a single automation may leave already queued messages; the master Suds AI switch is the immediate stop. See Suds AI controls and Review request drafting.

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What data the AI sees

To do the work above, the AI is given the relevant customer’s details and conversation history, scoped to your organization. It does not have access to:

• Photos or file attachments
• Payment card details
• Any other organization’s data (every request is scoped to yours)

Call and voicemail recordings are an exception worth calling out on paid Starter and existing paid contracts. When call recording is enabled, recordings are transcribed and summarized so you can read a summary instead of re-listening. See Call recording, transcripts, and summaries.

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Privacy and AI providers

Your data is processed by two AI providers, each only for the length of a single request:

• Anthropic powers the text features (suggestions, drafting, rewriting, summaries). Under Anthropic’s commercial API terms, your inputs and outputs are not used to train its models.
• OpenAI provides the speech-to-text model (Whisper) used to transcribe call and voicemail recordings, and only when you have call recording turned on. Under OpenAI’s API terms, API inputs are not used to train its models.

No customer data is shared with any other AI provider. You can read Anthropic’s commercial terms and training policy directly.

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Usage

Every member with owner or admin access can see the organization’s AI usage under Settings then Usage, measured in tokens and requests for the date range you choose. Usage is shown as quantities, not costs. Enforced AI credit allowances reset when the current Stripe subscription period renews.