Fin AI macros: A practical guide to automating your Intercom AI

If your team uses Intercom, you’ve probably spent years building a library of amazing macros. They're the backbone of your support team, loaded with answers you know work, perfect phrasing, and little shortcuts that save tons of time. So, when Intercom rolled out Fin, its AI agent, the next logical step seemed obvious: connect Fin to those macros and let the automation fly.

But it’s not quite that simple.

Getting Fin to actually use all that knowledge you've built up isn't a one-click deal. In fact, the way it’s set up out of the box can feel like a step backward, pushing you into a manual process that’s a pain to scale and even tougher to keep up to date.

This guide will walk you through the standard way of handling Fin AI Macros, explain why it often becomes a bottleneck, and show you a much smarter, automated way to connect your AI to your entire knowledge base.

Fin AI Macros: Getting the basics right

Before we get into the weeds, let's make sure we're on the same page about the two main parts of this puzzle. It’ll help make it clear why there's a disconnect in the first place.

What is Intercom's Fin AI?

Fin is Intercom’s own AI agent, built to answer customer questions and resolve support tickets without needing a human to step in. The idea is that it can handle complex questions, help with troubleshooting, and pass conversations over to your team when it gets stuck. To do this, it needs to learn from a knowledge base, like your help center articles, so it can give fast, accurate answers. The goal is to free up your agents from answering the same questions over and over, so they can focus on the trickier issues.

A screenshot of the Intercom AI Chatbot interface, demonstrating how Fin AI Macros work in a live customer interaction.

What are Intercom macros?

Macros (you might know them as canned responses or saved replies) are just pre-written responses your support agents use to answer common questions quickly. But they’re so much more than just text snippets. They’re a living library of your team’s collective brainpower. They capture your brand’s voice, contain solutions that you’ve seen work time and again, and represent thousands of hours of experience boiled down to a single click. For most teams, the macro library is one of the most valuable, and often overlooked, knowledge sources they have.

The disconnect between Fin AI and your macros

So, why can't Fin AI just start using your macros from day one? The issue boils down to how Fin is built. It’s designed to learn from structured, long-form content like help center articles. It isn’t really set up to access and understand the short, action-focused snippets of text inside the macros your agents use every day.

To get around this, Intercom has an official workaround: you can manually turn your macros into a different content type called "Snippets." As one user on the Intercom community forum found out, this is the recommended path.

And that’s the heart of the problem. You have this goldmine of high-quality knowledge locked away in your macros, but the only built-in way to get it to your AI is through a slow, one-by-one manual process.

Intercom's workaround: Using snippets

Let’s walk through the official method and its drawbacks. Understanding the limitations of this approach is the key to seeing why a different strategy is needed for any team that's serious about getting the most out of AI.

How snippets work with Fin AI

According to Intercom’s support team, Snippets are a text-only content source made just for Fin. The process is simple but completely manual. A team member has to go through every single macro, copy its content, create a new Snippet, and paste the text in.

If you have ten macros you want Fin to use, you do this ten times. If you have a thousand... you can see where this is going. When another user in that same community thread asked if there was a way to automatically move macros over to snippets, the answer was a simple, “They would need to be created manually.”

The limits of the manual snippet strategy

This might work if you only have a handful of macros, but it falls apart pretty quickly as you grow. Here are the biggest headaches that come with relying on a manual snippet strategy.

It’s a huge time sink and doesn't scale

This is the most obvious problem. Manually converting hundreds or even thousands of macros is a massive, low-impact project that pulls your team away from actually helping customers. It’s a temporary fix that creates a permanent maintenance job for someone.

The information gets stale, fast

Your business changes, and so do your support processes. Agents are constantly tweaking and improving answers in real conversations. With snippets, that new knowledge just gets lost. Unless someone remembers to go back and manually update the matching snippet, your AI will be working with old information.

It’s missing conversational context

Macros are often shortcuts. They don't always have the full context of a real back-and-forth conversation. The best AI models learn from the little details of real-world resolutions, like how agents greet customers, ask clarifying questions, and confirm that an issue is solved. Snippets are just static blocks of text.

It creates separate knowledge piles

Your macros are just one piece of the puzzle. Your team probably also relies on internal wikis in Confluence, process docs in Google Docs, or other knowledge bases. The snippet strategy completely ignores these other valuable resources, leaving your AI with only a small part of the picture.

This table sums up the differences between the manual process and what a more automated solution should feel like.

Feature	Manual Snippet Process (Intercom's method)	Automated Knowledge Integration
Setup time	Days or weeks of manual data entry.	Minutes with one-click integrations.
Knowledge sources	Limited to manually created snippets.	Syncs macros, past tickets, docs, and more.
Maintenance	Requires constant manual updates.	Learns and updates on its own.
Context	Static text, missing conversational nuance.	Learns from thousands of real conversations.
Scalability	Poor; gets harder to manage over time.	Excellent; scales right along with you.

A better way: Automatically syncing your knowledge with AI

Instead of pouring hours into a manual migration project, modern AI platforms use simple integrations to do the heavy lifting for you. This approach not only saves a ton of time but also leads to a smarter, more helpful AI agent.

Go beyond macros by training AI on your actual conversations

The best answers aren't just hiding in your macros; they're in the thousands of successfully resolved tickets in your help desk. That's where the good stuff is.

An integration-first platform like eesel AI plugs directly into your Intercom account and automatically learns from your entire conversation history. It looks at how your best agents handle different situations, picking up on your tone, context, and proven solutions. This is so much more powerful than feeding an AI static snippets because it learns from what actually works in the real world, capturing the details that a simple text block can't. Your AI gets trained by your top performers from day one, without you having to do a thing.

Unify all your knowledge in minutes, not months

A truly smart AI needs access to all your knowledge, not just bits and pieces. With an automated approach, you don’t have to pick and choose. For example, eesel AI lets you connect all your knowledge sources with one-click integrations, including Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and more. This gives your AI a complete, unified brain, letting it pull answers from wherever your best information lives.

This image shows the ease of connecting various knowledge sources to enhance Fin AI Macros automatically.

The best part? You can be up and running in minutes. The entire setup is self-serve, with no complex API work or developer hours needed. It’s a huge contrast to the days or weeks you’d spend on a manual snippet project.

Test your AI with confidence before you go live

Flipping the switch on an AI can feel like a leap of faith. How do you know it’s going to do a good job? This is another spot where a modern approach really stands out. With eesel AI, there’s a simulation mode that lets you test your AI on thousands of your past Intercom tickets in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have responded, get an accurate prediction of your resolution rate, and find any gaps in its knowledge, all before a single customer ever talks to it. This takes the risk out of the whole process and gives you the confidence to turn it on.

A screenshot of the Fin AI testing environment, where you can safely simulate and validate Fin AI Macros before deployment.

A quick look at Intercom's pricing model

When you're looking at any AI solution, you have to understand the costs. According to its website, Intercom’s suite starts at $0.99 per resolution on top of a monthly per-seat cost for your human agents.

While that sounds simple enough, a per-resolution pricing model has a big downside: your costs are unpredictable and can climb quickly. A busy month, a new product launch, or an unexpected bug can cause a spike in resolutions and a surprisingly high bill. This model basically penalizes you for being more successful at deflecting tickets. It’s an important factor to think about, as other platforms like eesel AI offer transparent, predictable plans with no per-resolution fees, so your costs stay the same no matter how many tickets your AI resolves.

Stop migrating, start integrating

Manually converting your Intercom macros into snippets just isn't a strategy that can grow with you. It's a flawed, short-term fix for a long-term goal. It eats up valuable time, creates a maintenance headache, and ultimately holds your AI back from what it could be.

The future of AI in customer support is all about seamless integration, not tedious data entry. The aim should be to give your AI access to all of your team's knowledge, no matter where it is, and let it learn continuously from the great work your team is already doing.

Unlock your Intercom's true potential

Your macros and conversation history are too valuable to be stuck in a manual workflow. Instead of spending weeks on a migration project that will be out of date the second you finish it, you can connect your knowledge base automatically.

With eesel AI, you can plug directly into Intercom, train your AI on past tickets and macros, and go live with a smarter agent in minutes. See how it works by starting a free trial or booking a demo today.