For a seamless and robust artificial intelligence-based assistant experience, an intent-based query and response router has been designed to operate as an intelligent layer between a user and multiple backend services that may respond to one or more queries over the course of a conversation with the user. The query router interacts with an intent classification service to obtain an intent classification for a prompt that is based on a user query. The query router uses the intent classification, which is used as an identifier of a backend service, to route the user query to an appropriate one (or more) of the backend services. When a response is detected, the query router determines a corresponding conversation and provides the response for the conversation.