How to detect leads automatically from contact forms with AI

Not every message from your contact form is a real sales opportunity. Learn how AI can automatically detect leads hidden in your submissions.

February 12, 2026 by DropForm Team

Introduction

Contact forms attract all kinds of messages: sales requests, support questions, partnership ideas, random feedback, and sometimes spam. Treating all of them the same makes it easy to miss real buying signals.

In this article, you will see how AI can automatically detect leads in your submissions, and how DropForm makes this easy without building your own AI pipeline.

Why automatic lead detection matters

As your product grows, manual triage becomes risky:

Real leads get buried under support noise
Follow-ups are delayed or forgotten
Teams waste time reading non-sales messages

What you want is a way to answer this question automatically:

"Is this message likely to be a lead?"

If the answer is yes, it should be highlighted, routed, or followed up automatically.

What AI lead detection looks like

Here are some typical contact form messages:

"I would like a demo and pricing for our 15 person team."
"Your app is great, but dark mode would be nice."
"I am getting an error when I try to log in."
"We are an agency looking for a form backend for our clients."

AI lead detection can classify them like this:

Demo and pricing request - LEAD
Feature suggestion - FEEDBACK
Login error - BUG
Agency partnership opportunity - LEAD

When you combine this with a dedicated lead category and, optionally, a priority score, you can build a simple view that shows only messages that look like potential revenue.

Lead detection in DropForm

DropForm uses AI to enrich submissions with a category field, among others:

category - LEAD, BUG, FEEDBACK, SPAM, OTHER
priority - LOW, MEDIUM, HIGH
sentiment - NEGATIVE, NEUTRAL, POSITIVE
summary - one line description

For contact and sales forms, the category = LEAD value is especially useful.

You can:

Filter your submissions by category = LEAD in the DropForm dashboard
Use the REST API to fetch only LEAD submissions
Receive LEAD submissions in a separate Slack channel via webhooks
Sync LEAD rows into a CRM or Google Sheet for follow-up

Example lead submission JSON

Here is an example of what an AI-enriched lead submission might look like in JSON:

This is enough structure to:

Trigger automations when category is LEAD
Use priority to handle larger or more urgent requests first
Use summary to scan a list of leads quickly

Example: sending leads to a separate Slack channel

Because DropForm includes AI fields in webhooks, you can route leads with a few lines of code. Here is a simplified Node.js style example:

You can adapt this pattern to send leads into your CRM, Airtable, Notion, or any other tool.

Getting started

To start detecting leads automatically with DropForm:

Create or open your main contact or sales form in DropForm
Enable AI classification and summarization for that form
Send a few test messages that look like leads and non-leads
Filter by category = LEAD to verify the behavior
Optionally, connect webhooks or Google Sheets to build your own lead views

Conclusion

Automatic lead detection is a small change that can make a big difference to how consistently you follow up with potential customers. Instead of scanning every message manually, you get a focused view of submissions that look like real opportunities.

By using DropForm's AI-powered form intelligence, you can add lead detection to your existing forms without changing your frontend or building a separate AI service.