Freshdesk AI automations: A complete 2025 guide

If you’re on a customer support team, you know the feeling. The ticket queue is always full, customers need answers now, and your team is stretched thin. It’s a constant balancing act. That’s why so many teams are looking at AI automation, not as some futuristic novelty, but as a practical tool to keep things from getting out of hand.

This guide is all about the native Freshdesk AI automations. We'll get into what its core AI, Freddy, can actually do, how to set it up, and what the pricing looks like. But we'll also talk honestly about where it struggles and show you how adding a more advanced AI layer can help you build a support system that’s genuinely helpful and ready to grow with you.

What are Freshdesk AI automations?

So, what are Freshdesk AI automations? In short, they’re the set of features inside Freshdesk that use artificial intelligence to handle repetitive tasks, give agents a hand, and hopefully make the customer experience a bit smoother. The brain behind all of this is Freddy AI, Freshdesk’s own AI engine.

Freddy's job is split into two main roles:

• AI Agents: Think of these as the customer-facing chatbots. They hang out on your support channels to provide quick answers and point people to self-service options, aiming to solve the simple stuff without needing a human.

• AI Copilot: This is the agent's sidekick. It works behind the scenes in the helpdesk to help draft replies, summarize long email chains, and pull up relevant info.

Key features of native Freshdesk AI automations

Freddy AI has a few tricks up its sleeve to help manage the daily grind of support work. Here’s a look at what it can do straight out of the box.

Automated ticket management

Let's be honest, nobody enjoys manually sorting and assigning tickets. Freddy AI helps with this by reading incoming tickets and suggesting the right category, priority, and status. It can also handle ticket routing, sending a request to the right agent or group based on things like their skills or how busy they are. It just means less time spent on admin and quicker handoffs to the person who can actually fix the problem.

AI-powered self-service

Any ticket that doesn't get created is a win. Freshdesk uses AI to power its chatbots, which can answer common questions by digging through your public knowledge base. The AI can also suggest help articles to customers as they’re typing a new ticket, which sometimes solves their problem before they even click "submit."

The Email AI Agent

For teams living in their email inbox, the Email AI Agent is a big deal. It works by reading a customer's email, figuring out what they're asking for, and then searching the public Freshdesk knowledge base for answers. From there, it generates a summary and sends it back. If the customer finds the answer helpful, the agent can even resolve the ticket automatically.

The Freddy AI Copilot for agents

The AI Copilot is designed to make your human agents' lives a little easier. It sits right in their workspace and acts as an assistant. It’s pretty good at summarizing long, complicated ticket histories into a few bullet points, suggesting canned responses or macros, and helping make sure everyone on the team is using a consistent tone.

This video provides an overview of how the Freddy AI agent works to provide self-service and instant resolutions for customers.

Setting up and managing Freshdesk AI automations

Getting Freshdesk's AI up and running isn't as simple as flipping a switch. It takes a bit of thought to get it working the way you want. You don’t have to be a developer, but you do need to tell the AI how to behave.

The setup usually involves a few steps:

• Setting up trigger rules: First, you have to tell the AI when to jump in. For the Email AI Agent, for example, its only trigger is when a new email ticket is created. You can set rules based on ticket details, who the customer is, or their company.

• Configuring languages: You’ll need to pick which languages you want the AI to work in. This really depends on what languages your knowledge base is written in and where your customers are.

• Editing templates: The AI uses standard templates for its emails. You'll want to go in and tweak these for each language so they sound like they're coming from your brand, not a robot.

• Adjusting advanced settings: To keep the AI from going rogue, you can add some guardrails. For instance, you can cap the number of tickets it’s allowed to handle each day. This is helpful for controlling costs and rolling out the AI slowly.

Key limitations of native Freshdesk AI automations (and how to solve them)

While Freshdesk's built-in AI is a decent starting point, you’ll probably start to feel its limits once you try to scale up or deal with more complex customer problems. Here are the biggest hurdles and what you can do about them.

Challenge 1: Your knowledge is all over the place

Here’s the first big catch: Freddy AI is designed to learn from information stored inside Freshdesk, like your public help articles.

But that’s not how real company knowledge works, is it? The most important information is usually scattered everywhere, in Confluence, random Google Docs, internal wikis in Notion, and old Slack threads. Freddy can’t see any of that, which means its answers are often incomplete. It’s only seeing a tiny piece of the puzzle.

An infographic illustrating how eesel AI centralizes knowledge from different sources to power Freshdesk AI automations.

This is where a tool like eesel AI comes in. It connects to all of your company’s knowledge, wherever it lives. With one-click integrations, it securely learns from everything, past tickets, internal wikis, and private docs. This gives your AI a complete picture, so it can give answers that are actually complete and correct.

Challenge 2: No way to test it without risk

Letting a new AI talk to your customers can be a little stressful. How do you know if it's going to do a good job? Freshdesk doesn’t really give you a way to see how its AI will handle real questions before you set it live.

This "launch and hope for the best" method is risky. A few bad interactions right off the bat can hurt customer trust and end up creating more work for your team as they jump in to clean up the AI’s messes.

A screenshot showing the simulation mode in eesel AI for testing Freshdesk AI automations.

We built eesel AI to solve this exact problem. It includes a simulation mode that lets you test your AI on thousands of your own past tickets in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have responded, get solid forecasts on how many tickets it will resolve, and tweak its behavior before it ever talks to a single customer.

Challenge 3: Limited control over what the AI can do

You can set some basic triggers in Freshdesk, but the AI’s actions are pretty limited. It can suggest an article or send a pre-written reply, and that’s about it.

But what about when a customer asks, "Where's my order?" or "Can you update my subscription?" A truly helpful AI needs to be able to do things, not just say things. Freddy AI can't look up an order status in Shopify, check a user's account details in your database, or tag a ticket for escalation.

A screenshot of the customization and action workflow screen in eesel AI, an alternative to native Freshdesk AI automations.

For that, you need a more powerful workflow engine. eesel AI gives you exactly that. Its prompt editor and support for custom API actions let you define precisely how your AI should behave. You can teach it to perform complex tasks, look up real-time information from other tools, and customize its personality and tone. You get total control to build AI workflows that actually match your business needs.

A closer look at Freshdesk AI pricing

It's also worth noting that Freshdesk's AI features aren't always included in the standard plans. They’re often sold as add-ons, and the pricing can get a little tricky to predict.

Based on their current pricing, here’s a rough idea of the costs:

Feature / Add-on	Plan Availability	Cost	Billing Model
Freddy AI Copilot	Pro & Enterprise	$29/agent/month	Per Agent
Freddy AI Agent	Pro & Enterprise	$100 per 1,000 sessions	Per Session (Usage-Based)

The main thing to watch out for is the usage-based pricing for the AI Agent. A "session" is any unique chat with the bot. This model means your costs can swing wildly from month to month. If you have a busy period with a spike in tickets, you could get hit with a surprisingly high bill. It makes budgeting tough and almost penalizes you for growing.

A screenshot of eesel AI's public pricing page, which offers an alternative to the pricing of Freshdesk AI automations.

In contrast, eesel AI's pricing is designed to be simple and predictable. Our plans are based on a flat number of AI interactions per month, and we never charge you extra for resolutions. This keeps your costs stable, so you can handle more support volume without worrying about an out-of-control invoice.

Should you use native Freshdesk AI automations?

So, what's the verdict? Native Freshdesk AI automations are a fine place to start if your team is just beginning to explore AI. Freddy is good enough for basic ticket routing and deflecting simple questions using your existing Freshdesk knowledge base.

But as your support needs get more complex, you'll likely hit a wall. The disconnected knowledge, unpredictable pricing, and lack of deep customization will hold your team back from getting the most out of what AI can do.

To build a support system that can really scale, you need a platform that works with Freshdesk but isn't stuck inside its ecosystem. A tool that connects to all your company's knowledge and gives you full control over your AI is what will really unlock new levels of efficiency and help you deliver a better customer experience.

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