A practical guide to finding the best Front AI chatbot in 2025

So, your team uses Front. It’s a great tool for wrangling all your customer conversations, emails, live chat, social messages, into one manageable place. For a while, it feels like you've finally tamed the chaos.

But then your company grows. The queue of customer questions gets longer and longer. Response times start to slip, and your support team is spending all day on repetitive, simple questions instead of the tricky stuff that actually requires their expertise. That’s usually the moment when you start thinking, "There has to be a better way. Maybe AI can help?"

If you're looking to add some AI muscle to your Front workspace, you're in the right place. We're going to give you a straight-up overview of what a "Front AI chatbot" is, what Front offers natively, and why a more specialized, third-party tool is often the smarter long-term investment.

What exactly is a Front AI chatbot?

Before we get into the weeds, let's clear up what we're actually talking about, because it's not as simple as just "turning on the AI."

What is Front?

Let’s remember that Front is, at its core, a customer operations platform. Its superpower is bringing communication channels together so humans can collaborate around them. Think of it as a shared inbox that’s been seriously beefed up. It was built to make your team more efficient, not to be a standalone AI automation powerhouse.

What is the chatbot part?

When people go looking for a "Front AI chatbot," they're typically after one of two things:

1. AI features that are built directly into the Front platform.

2. An external AI tool that can plug into and work with Front.

Just to add a little confusion to the mix, there’s also a Nordic company called Front AI that develops conversational AI. This guide isn't about them; we're focused on AI solutions that integrate with the Front helpdesk you and your team use every day. So really, your decision boils down to this: do you use Front’s built-in AI add-ons, or do you connect a more powerful, specialized tool?

Native vs. third-party Front AI chatbot: What’s the difference?

This is the main fork in the road. You can choose the convenience of a built-in feature or the power of a dedicated integration. One is easy to flip on, but the other gives you way more control and, frankly, a better bang for your buck.

A look at native Front AI chatbot features

Front does offer its own suite of AI tools. They're designed to help your agents work faster from right inside their existing workflow. According to their pricing page, these features include:

• AI Copilot: Suggests and drafts replies for agents, who can then review and send them.

• AI Autopilot: An AI agent that can handle simple resolutions and actions on its own.

• Smart QA: Automatically scores agent-customer conversations for quality control.

• Smart CSAT: Tries to figure out customer satisfaction from the conversation, so you don’t have to send a survey.

These are definitely helpful for giving your team a little productivity boost. The problem is, the real automation heavy-hitter (AI Autopilot) is sold as a pricey add-on. And all these tools are designed to work only within the Front ecosystem. That sounds great for a clean interface, but it's a huge drawback if your company's actual knowledge, the stuff your support team relies on, is scattered across different places.

Why a third-party Front AI chatbot integration makes sense

Many teams try the native tools and quickly realize they need more. They hit a wall and end up choosing a third-party solution for a few pretty compelling reasons:

• It can connect to all your knowledge: A specialized tool isn't trapped inside your helpdesk. It can connect to everything: your internal wiki in Confluence, your process docs in Google Docs, and even the tribal knowledge buried in old tickets from a previous helpdesk.

• You get way more control: You gain access to advanced workflow builders. This lets you decide exactly which tickets get automated. You can create custom AI personas, define its tone of voice, and even tell it to perform actions like looking up order information or updating a contact in your CRM.

• It’s more budget-friendly: Third-party tools often have clear, predictable pricing. You won’t get hit with per-resolution fees that turn a busy support month into a budget crisis.

• You’re not locked in: By using an AI tool that’s separate from your helpdesk, you avoid being tied to one platform. If you decide to move from Front to another system down the line, you can bring your automated workflows with you without starting from scratch.

This is exactly the problem a tool like eesel AI was built to solve. It’s designed to plug into the software you already use, including Front. It unifies all your scattered knowledge and gives you total control over how you automate support, without making you switch platforms.

What to look for in a great Front AI chatbot

Not all AI tools are created equal. As you start looking at different options, there are a few features that really separate the good from the great.

A setup that doesn't take forever

Your team is already slammed. The last thing you have time for is a six-month implementation project that requires endless sales calls, demos, and a developer's help just to get started.

A modern AI tool should be self-serve. Period. With a tool like eesel AI, for instance, you can connect your helpdesk and other knowledge sources with just a few clicks. You can build your first AI agent and have it running in minutes, not months, without ever having to talk to a salesperson unless you want to.

Access to all your company knowledge

Let’s be honest: a chatbot is only as smart as the information you give it. If it can only read your public FAQ page, it's going to be pretty useless for anything beyond the most basic questions. The best AI solutions can learn from every single place your team stores information.

An infographic showing how a third-party Front AI chatbot like eesel AI can connect to various knowledge sources.

Look for a platform that can bring all that scattered knowledge together. This is a huge deal. eesel AI does this by training on your past Front conversations, your macros, and your help center articles. But more importantly, it can also connect instantly to external sources like Notion, Sharepoint, and other internal wikis. This creates one single, reliable brain for your bot to use.

Pinpoint control over what your AI automates

Handing over customer conversations to an AI can feel a little scary. An "all-or-nothing" approach where the bot tries to answer everything is a recipe for some very unhappy customers. You need to be able to tell the AI exactly what to handle and when to immediately pass a conversation to a human.

A screenshot showing the customization rules for an advanced Front AI chatbot, giving users pinpoint control.

This is where having a flexible workflow builder is a must. With eesel AI, you can create very specific rules to define the AI's job. You can start small, telling it to only handle simple Tier 1 tickets like "Where is my order?" or "How do I reset my password?" and escalate everything else. You can also customize its personality, its tone of voice, and even teach it to do things like add a specific tag to a ticket or call an external API.

The ability to test your AI chatbot safely

You should never, ever test a new chatbot on your live customers. That’s just asking for trouble. You need a safe environment where you can see how it will perform, find its weak spots, and feel confident before you unleash it.

The simulation mode in eesel AI allows you to safely test your Front AI chatbot on past tickets.

This is a massive differentiator for eesel AI. It has a simulation mode that lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your past tickets in a safe, sandboxed environment. You get a detailed report that forecasts your likely resolution rate and shows you the exact answers the AI would have given to real customer questions. It lets you fine-tune everything and launch with complete confidence.

A deep dive into Front AI chatbot pricing and limitations

It's really important to understand the total cost of any new tool, and with bundled software, the price on the sticker is often not the final price you pay. Front's model requires you to pay for a base plan for every user, and then tack on the AI features as separate add-ons, which can make your bill climb quickly.

Front AI chatbot add-on pricing

Here's a quick look at what you can expect to pay for Front's native AI features, based on their official pricing page. Remember, these costs are in addition to the per-user plan you're already paying for.

What to watch out for with a bundled approach

Beyond the sticker shock, relying on a bundled solution comes with a few other big drawbacks.

• Unpredictable costs: We really can't say this enough. Per-resolution pricing punishes you for automating successfully. It creates a weird situation where you almost don't want the AI to resolve too many tickets, which defeats the entire purpose. In contrast, eesel AI's pricing is based on a transparent and predictable monthly interaction limit. You get all the features, AI Agent, AI Copilot, and Triage, under one simple plan with no surprises on your bill.

• Trapped knowledge: Front's AI learns from data that lives inside Front. If your most important troubleshooting guides, return policies, or technical specs are in an external system like Confluence or Google Docs, the AI is completely blind to them. This seriously limits its ability to answer anything but the most basic questions accurately.

• Inflexible workflows: Bundled tools often don't have the advanced, customizable action steps that a dedicated platform gives you right away. What if you need your bot to check an order status in Shopify or create a developer ticket in Jira? With a native tool, that often requires custom development work, assuming it's even possible.

Choosing the right Front AI chatbot

Look, Front offers some convenient, native AI features that are a decent starting point for basic agent assistance. If all you want is a tool to help your team draft replies a little faster, the AI Copilot add-on might be all you need.

However, for teams who are serious about automation, control, and getting the most value for their money, a specialized third-party solution is almost always the better path. An integrated platform gives you the power to connect all your knowledge sources, build workflows that fit your exact business needs, and grow your support operations without worrying about a runaway bill.

The best way forward is to think about your specific needs. Do you need an AI that can learn from documents living outside of your helpdesk? Do you want to be in the driver's seat when it comes to what gets automated? Do you need a pricing model that you can actually predict and budget for?

If you answered yes to those questions, then a dedicated platform is the way to go. A tool like eesel AI is built to give you the best of both worlds: a seamless integration that feels right at home in your Front workflows, combined with the power of a fully customizable AI automation engine.

Ready to see what a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use AI chatbot can do for your Front workspace? You can start a free trial of eesel AI today and have it live in just a few minutes.