How to automatically categorize form submissions with AI

Stop manually reading every message. Learn how AI can classify form submissions into leads, bugs, feedback, spam - and how DropForm does it automatically.

February 12, 2026 by DropForm Team

Introduction

If your contact or support form receives more than a few submissions per day, you have probably faced this problem: some messages are bugs, some are feature requests, some are sales leads, and some are spam - and all of them look the same in your inbox.

Manually reading and labeling each submission does not scale. In this article, we will show how AI can automatically categorize form submissions - and how you can implement it without building your own AI infrastructure.

Why manual categorization breaks down

When submission volume grows, manual triage turns into a workflow bottleneck:

Important issues get buried
Leads are missed
Support response times increase
Patterns are harder to detect

The goal is simple: turn raw text into structured categories you can filter, sort, and automate against.

What AI categorization looks like

Imagine these messages:

"Your Slack integration keeps disconnecting."
"Can I get pricing for 25 users?"
"I would love dark mode support."
"Buy backlinks for cheap!!!"

AI categorization might classify them as:

BUG
LEAD
FEEDBACK
SPAM

Once categorized, you can:

Filter by BUG and fix issues faster
Route LEAD messages to sales
Group FEEDBACK to inform roadmap decisions
Ignore SPAM entirely

This is the difference between "a list of messages" and an inbox you can actually operate.

Two ways to implement AI categorization

Option 1 - Build it yourself

You can call an LLM API after each submission, run a classification prompt, and store the result. It works - but you now own an AI pipeline:

Prompt design and maintenance
Retries, timeouts, provider errors
Cost monitoring and token limits
Parsing structured outputs safely
Updating everything when models change

Option 2 - Use a form backend with built-in AI

DropForm automatically enriches each submission with AI fields you can use immediately:

category - LEAD, BUG, FEEDBACK, SPAM, OTHER
priority - LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH
sentiment - NEGATIVE, NEUTRAL, POSITIVE
summary - short plain-text summary

You enable AI per form, and categorization runs automatically after each submission. No prompts. No extra services.

How this improves real workflows

Support teams

Filter for category = BUG
Sort by priority = HIGH
Surface negative sentiment messages first

Sales teams

View category = LEAD
Trigger follow-ups automatically
Separate sales from general questions

Product teams

Analyze FEEDBACK trends
Quantify how often feature requests show up
Spot repeated pain points faster

Developers

Use webhooks to route based on category
Build automations without parsing raw text
Keep your frontend forms unchanged

Example JSON output

Once you have structured classification, everything becomes easier to automate. A single submission can be enriched like this:

This is the kind of payload you can filter, route, and report on - without manual labeling.

Getting started

To automatically categorize submissions with DropForm:

Create or open a form
Enable AI classification for that form
Send a few test submissions
Use the AI category in your dashboard, API, webhooks, or Google Sheets

From that moment on, every new submission is automatically categorized.

Conclusion

Automatic categorization is not about AI hype. It is about reducing cognitive load. When your form backend turns messages into structured signals, you spend less time reading and more time acting.

That is what AI-powered form intelligence makes possible.