What you should have in hand
required
Your account is approved and your brand assets are live.
required
Nominated inside Apple Business Register. Without this, messages have nowhere to route.
required
The identifiers Apple issues on approval.
Connect it
Create the inbox
Create an Apple Messages for Business inbox and supply the credentials Apple issued. The inbox is the
configured surface — channel plus team, hours and agent.
Attach your AI agent
Point the inbox at the agent that should handle it. Without one, every conversation waits for a human.
Set routing and hours
Which team owns it, how conversations are assigned, and what happens outside business hours. These
are per-inbox — your AMB inbox can behave differently from your web chat inbox.
Send a test message
Message your own business from an iPhone through one of your entry points.
Confirm it arrives in the right inbox, routes to the right team, and that the agent responds.
Test a rich primitive
Send a List Picker or a Rich Link and confirm it renders correctly on the device. Rich primitives are
the reason you are on this channel — verify one before you call it live.
Verify before you publish entry points
Once your Maps listing carries a Message button, customers will use it. Before that goes live, confirm:- A conversation reaches the intended inbox
- The AI agent responds, and its knowledge covers what people will actually ask
- Handoff to a human works, and someone is watching
- At least one rich primitive renders correctly on a real device
- Out-of-hours behaviour is set to something you would be happy for a customer to receive at 2am
Running more than one brand
Each AMB agent is one verified Apple business sender, typically one per brand. Multi-brand operations provision multiple agents, each with its own inbox, and there are no agent fees however many you run. See Apple Messages fees.Next
Rich Feature Messages
The eight primitives, now that you can send them.
Known limitations
Read before designing a flow around this channel.