A practical guide to Freshdesk AI setup & its limitations (2025)

Adding an AI to your help desk sounds great in theory. You imagine instant answers for customers, a lighter load for your agents, and a support operation that’s always on. Freshdesk pitches this future with its built-in AI, "Freddy." But how do you actually get from here to there?

Turning on an AI agent involves a specific setup process, and it comes with its own quirks, costs, and roadblocks. This guide will give you a clear, no-fluff look at the native Freshdesk AI setup. We'll walk through the steps, see what its AI can really do, talk about the price tag, and look at an alternative that might be a better fit for your team.

What is Freshdesk AI?

Freshdesk’s AI is known as Freddy AI. It’s not just one thing, but a whole suite of AI features baked into the platform to help with customer self-service and make your agents' lives easier.

Think of it in a few parts: there are AI Agents that act as customer-facing bots, learning from your help articles to answer basic questions over email or chat. Then there's the Freddy AI Copilot, which is like a sidekick for your human agents, helping them write replies, summarize tickets, and find the right help docs. It also includes AI-powered ticketing tools that can automatically sort and assign incoming tickets.

This infographic breaks down the essential parts of the Freshdesk AI setup, including the AI Agent, Copilot, and Insights features.

Because these tools are built right into Freshdesk, the idea is to make it simple to start automating your support workflows.

A step-by-step guide to the native Freshdesk AI setup

Getting Freddy AI up and running happens in your Freshdesk admin panel. While they have some tutorials, knowing the main steps ahead of time helps you see what you’re getting into.

This flowchart illustrates the step-by-step process for a native Freshdesk AI setup, from initial activation to configuring knowledge sources and automation rules.

First, switch it on

You’ll start by heading to the Admin section in Freshdesk and looking for a tab labeled "Freddy" or "AI Agents." Depending on your plan, you might need to start a trial or buy an add-on like the AI Copilot before you can do anything else.

Point it to your knowledge sources

This is probably the most important part of your Freshdesk AI setup. The AI is only as smart as the information you give it. Freshdesk lets you connect a few different things:

• Solution Articles: This is the main one, pulling from your existing Freshdesk knowledge base.

• Files: You can upload documents like PDFs or Word docs.

• URLs: Got a public FAQ page or product documentation? You can link to it.

• Custom Q&As: You can also spoon-feed the bot specific questions and answers for topics it needs to know.

Here's the catch: Freshworks' own documentation mentions some pretty clear limits, like a cap of 200 files and 25 URLs. If your company has tons of documentation scattered everywhere, this could be a real problem.

Give your AI agent a personality

Once your knowledge is hooked up, you get to decide how your AI bot talks to customers. The Persona settings let you pick a name and avatar and give it some general rules on its tone of voice. The Skills section is where you can set up more complex automations, like teaching the bot how to process an order cancellation by connecting it to other systems.

Set up the rules for when it should jump in

Finally, you have to tell the AI when to activate. In Freshdesk, you do this with automation rules. For the email bot, for example, you might set up a trigger like, "if a new ticket's subject line contains 'shipping'," telling the bot that this is one it should try to answer on its own.

Pros and cons of the native Freshdesk AI setup

Freshdesk's built-in AI is a decent place to start, but it's important to know its limits before you go all in.

What the native setup does well

Since it's a native feature, Freddy AI fits right into the Freshdesk interface. Agents don't have to jump between screens to use the Copilot, and the basic setup is all in one place. If your team's entire world lives and breathes inside Freshdesk, this can be a pretty smooth way to dip your toes into AI.

Where you might hit a wall

As you start to rely on it more, you might run into a few common headaches with the native Freshdesk AI setup.

• It can't read everything: This is the big one. Most companies’ knowledge isn’t just in one help center. It’s spread across Confluence, Google Docs, internal wikis, and thousands of past support tickets. Freddy AI can’t easily connect to all those places, which means you either have to spend weeks migrating content or just accept that your bot won’t know the answer to a lot of questions.

• You have to launch it "blind": The Freshdesk setup doesn't give you a good way to test your AI agent before letting it talk to real customers. You basically set the rules, cross your fingers, and turn it on. Without a safe way to test, you risk some awkward first impressions and have no real idea what your automation rate will be.

• The workflows are pretty basic: You can set triggers, but what the AI can actually do is often limited. Need your bot to check a real-time order status from a Shopify store or pull data from an internal tool? You’ll likely find that the built-in options just aren’t flexible enough.

What does the Freshdesk AI setup cost?

The pricing for Freshdesk's AI isn't straightforward; it's a mix of monthly plans and usage-based add-ons. You'll want to add everything up to see the true cost.

Based on their pricing page, here's how it breaks down:

Feature	Plan Requirement	Cost (Billed Annually)	Notes
Base Plan	Pro or Enterprise	$49 or $79 /agent/month	You can't get AI features on the free or basic plans.
Freddy AI Copilot	Pro or Enterprise	+$29 /agent/month	This is the add-on your agents need for assistance.
Freddy AI Agent	Pro or Enterprise	Starts at $100 / 1,000 sessions	This is for the bot that talks to customers, and you pay per use.

A "session" is just a single conversation between a customer and the bot. That cost can add up fast and is hard to predict. Let's say you have 10 agents on the Pro plan and you want both the agent copilot and the customer-facing bot. You're looking at over $780 per month just for the seats, plus a session-based fee that goes up every time a customer talks to your bot. This makes it tough to budget, especially when you have a busy month.

The alternative: A simpler, more powerful Freshdesk AI setup with eesel AI

If those limitations sound familiar, you might want to look at a third-party tool like eesel AI. It offers a more flexible way to handle your Freshdesk AI setup by working with the tools you already use instead of locking you in.

Go live in minutes, not months

There are no sales calls or long setup processes here. With eesel AI, you can sign up, connect your Freshdesk account in one click, and have a working AI agent ready to go in just a few minutes. It's built to be completely self-serve.

Instantly connect all your knowledge

This is where the difference is night and day. Instead of being stuck with just a few sources, you can train your AI on everything, wherever it lives:

• Past conversations from your Freshdesk tickets

• Your team's wiki in Confluence or Notion

• Shared Google Docs and PDFs

• Your public help center and website content

This infographic demonstrates how a flexible Freshdesk AI setup with eesel AI can connect to all your scattered knowledge sources, from helpdesks to internal wikis.

This means your AI actually understands your business and can give helpful, accurate answers from the very beginning.

Test with confidence before you launch

eesel AI gets rid of the launch-day anxiety. Its simulation mode tests your new AI setup against thousands of your past tickets. It then gives you a report showing exactly how it would have done, which tickets it could have solved, which ones it would have passed to a human, and what your automation rate would look like. This lets you tweak things and go live knowing it actually works.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, a key feature for testing your Freshdesk AI setup against historical data before going live.

Predictable pricing

With eesel AI, you get clear, feature-based plans without being charged per ticket resolved. Your costs are predictable, so you're not penalized for being busy. This makes it way easier to budget and see a clear return on your investment.

The eesel AI pricing page, showing a clear and predictable cost structure for your Freshdesk AI setup, unlike usage-based models.

What's the right Freshdesk AI setup for your team?

The native Freshdesk AI setup is a decent starting point if you're just starting to explore automation. If all your knowledge is already inside Freshdesk and your needs are simple, Freddy AI can certainly help deflect some common questions.

But if you need more control, want to connect knowledge from all your different apps, or prefer to test your AI before customers ever see it, you'll probably feel boxed in. When your team's brain is spread across multiple platforms, a more flexible tool is the way to go.

By connecting to all your existing tools and giving you a safe way to test, solutions like eesel AI let you build a smarter support system that works with Freshdesk, not in spite of it.