Overview
Autopilot creates ideas on your Ideas dashboard from conversations in your connected sources. Extracted signals are attached as Insights on those ideas. No portal action is taken unless you explicitly publish an idea to your portal.
Canny Ideas is available on Free, Core, Pro, and Business plans. Teams on legacy plans (Starter or Growth) will need to move to new plans to access Ideas.
How Autopilot works with Ideas
When Autopilot processes a conversation from a connected source (e.g. Intercom, Zendesk, Gong), it extracts feature requests and surfaces them in the Autopilot inbox as suggestions to create or update ideas.
Each suggestion offers the following actions:
Looks good — approve and apply the suggestion as-is. Autopilot creates a new idea on your Ideas dashboard, or attaches the conversation as an Insight on a matching existing idea.
Merge idea — for a new-idea suggestion, merge it into an existing idea (attaches the conversation as an Insight on that idea instead).
Make idea — for an Insight suggestion on an existing idea, create a new standalone idea instead.
Move idea / Move insight — assign the new idea to a different parent idea, or attach the Insight to a different idea.
Delete idea / Delete insight — discard the suggestion.
Approving any suggestion does not publish anything to your portal or notify any end-user.
The inbox also surfaces items classified as Spam or No feedback found in dedicated tabs so you can review or override Autopilot's decisions.
Send to Autopilot
In addition to connected sources, admins can manually submit content directly to Autopilot. Open the Send to Autopilot modal to paste any text — meeting notes, emails, an internal write-up — or upload a CSV. You can optionally attribute the feedback to a specific user and company, and add a source URL.
Autopilot processes the submission the same way it does conversations from other sources: ideas and Insights are created on your Ideas dashboard. See Send to Autopilot for full details.
Autopilot settings
In Settings → Autopilot, the Feedback Discovery tab controls how Autopilot acts on your feedback:
Public Actions: Manual / Automated — When Manual, Autopilot's suggestions appear in the inbox for your team to approve before any action visible on your portal is taken. When Automated, those public actions are applied automatically (with the ability to reverse them as needed).
Publish to portal — Off by default. When on, ideas Autopilot creates are also published to a portal board of your choice. With Public Actions set to Automated, this happens automatically; otherwise it happens when you approve from the inbox.
Idea Deduplication — When enabled, Autopilot reviews existing ideas when new ones are created to attach signals as Insights to a matching idea rather than creating duplicates.
The Knowledge Hub tab lets you upload documents (such as help center articles) so Autopilot can recognize your existing features. See The Autopilot Knowledge Hub for details.
Routing and tagging ideas
Autopilot uses AI semantic matching on the extracted feature request to assign each idea to the most relevant idea group on your Ideas dashboard. The matching is based on the content of the request — no keyword configuration is required.
Autopilot can also automatically assign relevant themes to ideas based on the content of the feature request, so related ideas are grouped under shared themes without manual tagging.
Publishing to the portal
By default, ideas created by Autopilot are internal only. If you want end-users to be able to see and vote on an idea, you can publish it to your portal from the idea detail view (or enable the Publish to portal setting to do so automatically).
When you publish an idea to the portal:
A linked piece of portal feedback is created.
The idea and the portal feedback remain connected but separate — changing the idea's status does not automatically change the portal feedback status, and vice versa.
Sources
Sources that count toward your plan's integration limit:
Sources that do not count toward your integration limit: Apple App Store, Canny API AI endpoint, Capterra, Freshdesk, G2, Gong, Google Play Store, Help Scout, ProductHunt, Salesforce AppExchange, Shopify, tl;dv, Trustpilot, TrustRadius, WordPress, Zoom.
Things to note about sources
Conversations are processed only after they are closed (or resolved/solved, depending on the source).
When first connecting a customer communications integration, Canny processes closed conversations from the previous 30 days by default.
Things to note
Insights added to an idea by Autopilot are visible in the idea's detail view.
The Autopilot inbox is visible to admins with the Owner or Manager admin role. Only Owners can access the Autopilot settings page.
Autopilot processes conversations from newest to oldest.
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