Audit Trail
When a customer, auditor or regulator asks "what exactly happened in that conversation?", you need a complete answer, even months later. Achilles records every step of every conversation without sampling, and separately records what your own administrators change. This page explains what is kept, how to review it, and the questions it helps compliance teams answer.
Two records
| Record | Shows | Where in the console |
|---|---|---|
| Conversation record | What customers and staff did with an agent, and what the agent did in response | Sessions under Operate |
| Administrator audit log | What your team did to the agents themselves | Audit Log under Operate |
What the conversation record contains
For every conversation, in order:
- The start and end of the conversation and who it was with, including their role.
- Each message from the person, and each reply from the agent.
- Each ability the agent tried to use, with the details and the result.
- Every safety decision, recorded as allowed or denied together with the reason. Denials are kept as their own type, so you can see all refusals in a period at once.
- Approval requests and how each one ended, whether confirmed, cancelled, expired or refused.
- Handoffs to a person, with the reason.
- Voice steps for spoken conversations.
- Errors and failures, so problems are visible.
- Usage such as the amount of AI processing each step used, which supports cost reviews.
Personal details are stored as codes, not readable values. See Personal data. Steps are numbered in sequence, so the order can always be reconstructed, even when steps happen within the same instant.
What the administrator audit log contains
Each entry says who did what and when.
| Recorded | Examples |
|---|---|
| Agent changes | Saving a definition, deploying, restoring an earlier version, deleting |
| Platform actions | Reloading the live agents |
| Channel changes | Creating, rotating or disabling a website or messaging channel |
| Credential changes | Adding or changing a data connection |
Each entry carries the person's name or email, kept even if their account is later removed, and whether it came from a signed-in person or from an automated tool. A failure to write an audit entry never blocks the action, but such failures are rare and visible to your Achilles contact.
How to review a conversation
- Open Sessions under Operate.
- Filter by agent, person, status or how recent it is. Status shows whether the conversation is active or was handed off.
- Open the conversation. You will see the chat replay on one side and the step-by-step timeline on the other.
- Follow the timeline to see what the agent looked up, what was allowed or denied, and whether an approval was requested.
- Note the reference number if it was escalated, and match it to the case in your own tools.
The replay is rebuilt from the permanent record, not from short-term memory, so it is accurate long after the chat has ended.
Questions compliance teams can answer
| Question | Where to look |
|---|---|
| Did the agent share data with someone who should not have had it? | Refusals and allowed lookups for the person's role in the timeline |
| Did the agent change anything without approval? | Approval events beside each change in the conversation |
| Who changed the agent's rules, and when? | Audit Log |
| Which conversations were escalated, and how were they handled? | Transfer Sessions and handed-off Sessions |
| What did the customer see at each point? | The replay, with hidden values as shown to that role |
| How often are refusals occurring? | The runtime summary on the Audit Log page |
Retention and export
Records are kept in your Achilles database. At the time of writing, there is no automatic deletion or archiving, so records remain until your team arranges otherwise. The data can be retrieved programmatically, and your IT team can arrange exports or reports for regulators. See the API reference and self-hosting for where the data lives. The console does not yet offer a one-click export or a cross-conversation search, so ask your Achilles contact if you need either.
If your policy requires that conversation records are deleted after a set period, or retained for a minimum period, agree this with your Achilles contact before launch.
Access to the records
Anyone who can open Sessions can read conversations, so limit console access to those who need it. See Users and teams. For an overview of controls, return to How Achilles keeps agents safe.