A deep dive into Fin AI summaries and its best alternative in 2025

Wrapping up a customer chat is never really the end of it for a support agent, is it? You still have to write up summaries and after-call work (ACW) notes. It’s a manual slog that eats up time you could be using to help the next person in the queue. AI promises to fix this by whipping up quick, accurate summaries, giving agents a few precious minutes back in their day.

Intercom's answer to this is Fin AI Summaries, a feature designed to boost agent efficiency inside its own ecosystem. But is it the right tool for every team? This guide will give you a straight-up overview of the feature, what it does, how it works, and what it’ll cost you. We'll also get into its limitations and show you a more flexible alternative for teams that want full control over their support automation.

What are Intercom’s Fin AI Summaries?

You can’t just buy Fin AI Summaries on its own. It’s a feature that’s baked into Intercom's bigger AI suite, which includes Fin AI Agent and Copilot. Its main job is to automatically create and post a summary of a customer conversation as an internal note, right there in the helpdesk inbox.

Think of it as a tool to help your teammates get up to speed fast, especially when a conversation is long or gets reopened. According to Intercom's own documentation, it’s not a button an agent can just click whenever they want. Instead, it’s an automated "action" you have to build into their Workflows engine. That means setting up a process, like triggering a summary when a ticket is closed or passed from one agent to another.

Key features and use cases of Fin AI Summaries

While the idea is pretty simple, the feature has a few specific uses that make it handy for teams already living and breathing Intercom.

Automated conversation summaries for agents

At its heart, the feature just boils down a long, sometimes messy, customer chat into a few key points. This is especially useful in a couple of common situations:

• After closing conversations: If a customer pops back up days later to reopen a ticket, the agent can see the whole history at a glance without having to reread a mountain of messages.

• Quality assurance: Managers can review an agent's work or get the gist of an issue without having to read the entire transcript.

It’s good to know there are some rules. A summary will only be posted if a conversation has more than three messages, and Intercom limits how many summaries you can generate per hour to keep things running smoothly.

Streamlining handovers and escalations

The summaries are probably most valuable when a ticket gets passed between people. Whether an issue gets escalated from a frontline agent to a specialist or handed over from a bot to a human, context is everything.

The AI-generated summary gives that context in a snap. The new agent doesn't have to scroll up and play detective, which cuts down on handle time and saves the customer from the frustration of repeating themselves. It’s a small thing that can make a real difference in the customer's experience.

How Fin AI Summaries is triggered through Intercom Workflows

Again, you can't just click a button to get a summary. The feature is an action block that you have to build into Intercom's Workflows. For example, you’d create a rule that says, "When a conversation is closed," and then add the "Add summary note" action to it.

This means you have to map out exactly when and where you want summaries to show up. While this is great for automation, it also adds a layer of setup and rigidity that might not work for every team’s process.

The limitations of Fin AI Summaries

Fin AI Summaries is a decent feature, but its cracks start to show as soon as you step outside the perfect Intercom bubble. For teams that need a bit more flexibility, these limitations can be real deal-breakers.

Locked into the Intercom ecosystem

This feature is built by Intercom, for Intercom. While the company mentions that Fin AI can connect with other helpdesks like Zendesk or Salesforce, the core functions like these workflow-triggered summaries are native and don't always play nicely with other platforms.

This pretty much locks you into their platform. If your team uses Freshdesk, Jira Service Management, or Gorgias, you just can't use this feature. You're left with a tough choice: either move your entire support operation over to Intercom or find a tool that was actually built to work with multiple platforms.

Limited knowledge sources

The quality of any AI-generated summary depends entirely on the information it can access. Fin mostly learns from your help center articles and old conversations within Intercom. That’s a good start, but it leaves a massive blind spot for businesses where knowledge is spread out everywhere.

What about those detailed technical guides in Confluence, the latest policy updates in Google Docs, or the quick answers shared in your company's Slack channels? Fin's summaries won't have that deeper context, which means it could miss important details. This is where a solution like eesel AI really comes into its own. It connects knowledge from over 100 sources, giving any AI tool a much richer, more accurate, and complete picture of your business.

Rigid automation and customization

The summary is a fixed, out-of-the-box action. You get a summary, and that's about it. There’s very little freedom to tweak the format, length, or focus of the note.

But what if you need more? For instance, what if you wanted the AI to not just summarize, but also analyze the summary for sentiment, tag the ticket with the right topics, and then send it to the correct department? In Intercom, you’d have to try and piece together a bunch of complicated, multi-step workflows, assuming it’s even possible. This lack of flexibility stops teams from building the kind of smart automation that actually saves time and cuts down on manual work.

Fin AI Summaries pricing

Fin AI Summaries doesn't have its own price tag. Its cost is bundled into Intercom's broader, and often confusing, AI and platform pricing. To get access, you're looking at a subscription with multiple layers.

Based on Intercom's own FAQ pages, here’s a rough breakdown of what you'll pay:

1. Intercom Helpdesk: First, you need a subscription to the Intercom Customer Service Suite. The seat price for this starts at $29 per helpdesk seat per month.

2. Fin AI Agent: If you use the customer-facing bot, you'll also pay $0.99 per resolution, with a 50-resolution minimum each month. A "resolution" is counted when a customer says their issue is solved or just stops replying after the AI's last message.

3. Copilot: Since the summary feature is for agents, its cost is tied more to Copilot, Intercom's agent assistant. This is an add-on that costs another $35 per seat per month.

When you add it all up, platform fees per seat, AI assistant fees per seat, and resolution fees for the bot, the costs can get unpredictable and hard to budget for, especially as your team and ticket volume grow.

A more flexible alternative: eesel AI

For teams that need more power, flexibility, and control without being stuck in one ecosystem, a dedicated AI platform is a much better way to go.

Integrate with your existing helpdesk in minutes

Unlike Intercom’s walled-garden approach, eesel AI is proudly helpdesk-agnostic. It’s built to plug right into the tools you already know and love. With one-click integrations for Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, and yes, even Intercom, you can add serious AI power without a painful migration process. The whole setup is self-serve, so you can connect your tools and start building in minutes, not months. No mandatory sales calls required.

Unify all your knowledge sources instantly

eesel AI fixes the context problem by connecting to your knowledge no matter where it is. You can easily pull information from Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, and your past ticket history. This gives your AI a complete, 360-degree view of your business, making sure that any action it takes, from summarizing a ticket to drafting a reply, is based on all the facts.

An infographic showing how eesel AI integrates with multiple knowledge sources, a key advantage over the more limited Fin AI Summaries.

Gain total control with a customizable workflow engine

With eesel AI, you’re not stuck with a simple "add summary" button. Its workflow engine and prompt editor are completely customizable, letting you define exactly what you want the AI to do and how you want it to behave.

For example, you could build a workflow where the AI:

1. Summarizes a new customer ticket.

2. Figures out the customer’s sentiment is "frustrated."

3. Tags the ticket with "VIP" and "Billing Issue."

4. Sends it directly to the Tier 2 finance queue.

5. Drafts a reply for the T2 agent that includes the summary and a link to the right billing policy from your internal Confluence space.

This level of control lets you automate complex processes from start to finish, not just one-off tasks.

A diagram illustrating eesel AI's customizable support automation workflow, which goes far beyond the simple note-taking of Fin AI Summaries.

Benefit from transparent, predictable pricing

eesel AI offers simple, clear pricing with no gotchas. Plans are based on a flat monthly fee for a certain number of AI interactions, where an interaction is either an AI reply or an AI action.

Most importantly, there are no per-resolution fees. This means your costs won't balloon as your support volume increases. You can automate more conversations and workflows without dreading the next bill, making your budget predictable and easy to scale.

A screenshot of eesel AI's clear and transparent pricing page, presented as a better alternative to the complex costs associated with Fin AI Summaries.

Plan	Monthly Price (Billed Annually)	AI Interactions/mo	Key Features
Team	$239	Up to 1,000	Train on docs, Slack integration, Copilot for help desk.
Business	$639	Up to 3,000	Everything in Team + train on tickets, AI Actions, bulk simulation.
Custom	Contact Sales	Unlimited	Advanced actions, multi-agent orchestration, custom integrations.

Go beyond Fin AI Summaries with true automation

Fin AI Summaries is a solid little feature for teams who are all-in on the Intercom platform and just need a simple way to generate notes. It does its job, but that’s pretty much where it stops.

Its limitations around platform flexibility, knowledge sources, customization, and its confusing pricing make it a poor fit for many modern support teams. If you want to keep your existing helpdesk, bring together all your company knowledge, and build powerful, custom automation, a dedicated platform is the obvious choice.

eesel AI isn't just an alternative for making summaries; it's a full-blown solution for end-to-end support automation that puts you in the driver's seat.

Ready to take control of your support automation?

Stop just summarizing tickets and start automating entire workflows. With eesel AI, you can connect your tools in minutes and build powerful AI agents that work across your entire knowledge base.

Start your free trial or book a demo to see how you can cut down on manual work and give your team the tools they need.