A practical Front AI review for support teams in 2025

You’ve probably heard of Front. They've built a reputation as a slick, collaborative inbox that helps teams get out of their siloed help desks. And like pretty much everyone else, they’ve jumped into the AI game with Front AI, a set of tools meant to make support teams faster and smarter.

We're all searching for that perfect AI tool to boost response quality and speed. The big question is, does Front AI actually live up to the hype? In this Front AI review, we’re going to get real. We'll dig into its features, unpack its slightly confusing pricing, and highlight some big limitations you should know about before you consider moving your whole team over.

What is Front AI?

First things first, Front AI isn't something you can just buy off the shelf. It’s a bundle of AI features baked right into the Front platform. So, to get the AI, you have to adopt Front as your main hub for email, chat, and every other customer conversation.

Their big idea is something they call "human-directed AI." The goal isn’t to replace your team with a bunch of bots that just close tickets. Instead, it’s about using AI to analyze conversations, help agents out, and automate the simple stuff, all while keeping your team in the driver's seat. It's a nice concept, especially if you're a bit nervous about letting an AI run loose and mess up the customer experience.

The whole suite is split into a few key pieces, each handling a different part of the support workflow. We’ll take a look at:

• Analyze: Topics, Smart QA, and Smart CSAT

• Assist: Copilot, Compose, and Summarize

• Automate: Autopilot

Key features and capabilities

Front organizes its AI tools into three buckets: Analyze, Assist, and Automate. It's a pretty sensible way to frame how AI can help a support team, so let's get into what these features actually do for you on a day-to-day basis.

Analyze: Understanding customer conversations

Before you can automate anything, you have to know what people are asking about. Front’s "Analyze" tools are built to give you that kind of insight.

• Topics: This feature automatically reads your incoming messages and sorts them by what the customer wants. Think of it as AI-powered tagging for common issues like "refund request," "billing question," or "found a bug." This is handy for getting tickets to the right people and for pulling reports to see what’s eating up most of your team's time.

• Smart QA & Smart CSAT: These are all about keeping an eye on quality. Smart QA tries to take the pain out of manually reviewing your agents' conversations. It grades interactions based on your own internal standards, giving you a continuous read on service quality without having to randomly sample tickets. Smart CSAT does something similar for customer happiness by guessing how a customer feels based on their messages. It’s a clever way to get a wider view of satisfaction beyond the few people who bother to fill out a survey.

Assist: Empowering human agents

This is where you can really see Front’s "keep a human involved" approach in action. The "Assist" features are designed to give your agents AI sidekicks to help them work faster, without completely taking over.

• Copilot: This is the main event for agent assistance. As an agent is typing a reply, Copilot pops up with suggested answers based on past conversations and your help center articles. The agent can then take that suggestion, tweak it to get the tone just right, and send it. It’s a solid way to speed up replies to frequently asked questions and helps new hires get up to speed without constantly bugging their teammates.

• Compose & Summarize: These are smaller tools, but still pretty useful. Compose is like a little writing coach, helping agents polish their drafts for grammar, tone, or length. Summarize is exactly what it sounds like: it creates a quick recap of a long, rambling conversation so the next agent can jump in and get the gist in seconds without having to read the whole novel.

Automate: Handling inquiries with Autopilot

Autopilot is Front's take on a fully automated AI agent. It’s built to handle customer questions from start to finish on different channels, deflecting the easy stuff so your team has more time for the tricky problems.

Front pushes a "quality-first" angle for Autopilot. You can set it up to only handle questions it's very confident it can solve, based on what it has learned from your knowledge base and how well past AI interactions went. If a conversation gets too complex, it's supposed to pass it off smoothly to a human agent with all the context attached.

Knowledge source limitations

Okay, this is where we need to talk about a pretty big catch. An AI is only as good as the information it can learn from, and honestly, this is where Front AI starts to show some serious cracks. The features sound great on paper, but getting it to connect to your company's actual knowledge is a bit of a headache.

A quick look at their own help docs brings a few key problems to light:

• Manual Syncing: If you connect an external knowledge base, the content doesn't stay fresh automatically. Your team has to remember to hit a re-sync button every single time an article gets updated. If someone forgets, your AI is flying blind with old info.

• Public-Only Content: The AI can only learn from websites that are open to the public. It can't get into any of your password-protected or internal knowledge bases. This is a massive issue for any company that keeps its detailed technical docs, troubleshooting guides, or internal policies behind a login.

• Page Limits: Front can only sync around 3,000 pages per source. If you have years and years of documentation, you could hit that limit pretty fast.

• Limited Learning from Tickets: While Copilot uses old conversations to come up with suggestions, the main knowledge source for the fully automated Autopilot is your help center content. It doesn't seem to dig into the thousands of solved tickets where your team's real, hard-won expertise is hiding.

For any team whose most valuable information lives internally in tools like Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion, this is a non-starter. You need something more flexible. This is exactly why platforms like eesel AI were built, to connect all your knowledge sources right from the get-go. It hooks up to public help centers and private internal docs in minutes, and it trains directly on your historical support tickets to learn your business inside and out, no manual work needed.

Front AI pricing: What's included and what's extra?

Now let’s talk money. Front’s pricing can get a little tricky. The plans look feature-rich, but unlocking the full AI toolkit can get complicated, and expensive, very quickly. A lot of the best AI tools are either reserved for the priciest plan or sold as individual add-ons.

Here’s a quick table to show you how the AI features are spread out:

Feature / Plan	Starter ($25/seat/mo)	Professional ($65/seat/mo)	Enterprise ($105/seat/mo)
AI Topics	Included	Included	Included
AI Summarize/Compose	Included	Included	Included
AI Copilot	Limited usage (add-on for unlimited)	Limited usage (add-on for unlimited)	Included (unlimited)
AI Smart QA	Add-on ($20/seat/mo)	Add-on ($20/seat/mo)	Included
AI Smart CSAT	Add-on ($10/seat/mo)	Add-on ($10/seat/mo)	Included
AI Autopilot	Add-on ($0.89/resolution)	Add-on ($0.89/resolution)	Add-on ($0.89/resolution)

This add-on approach means that to get everything Front AI has to offer, you either have to shell out for their top-tier Enterprise plan or start tacking on extra fees per agent.

But the real eyebrow-raiser is the cost of Autopilot: $0.89 for every single resolution. This pay-per-resolution model means your monthly bill could be all over the place. If you have a sudden rush of support tickets, you could be looking at a surprisingly high invoice, which makes budgeting a total nightmare.

This model is a world away from platforms that give you predictable costs. For example, eesel AI rolls all of its products, including its AI Agent, Copilot, and Triage tools, into straightforward monthly plans with zero per-resolution fees. Your bill is the same every month, so you never get penalized for being busy.

The verdict: Is Front AI the right choice for you?

After this detailed Front AI review, it's pretty clear that while it's a capable tool, it’s definitely not for everyone.

It might be a good fit if: You're already all-in on the Front platform and most of your team's knowledge lives in a public help center. The integration is seamless, the collaborative tools are top-notch, and Copilot's "human-in-the-loop" style is great for teams wanting to dip their toes into AI without giving up total control.

However, you should probably look elsewhere if: You lean heavily on internal knowledge, have a massive library of documentation, or need your costs to be predictable. Moving your entire workflow to Front is a huge project, the knowledge source issues are a major technical roadblock, and the per-resolution pricing for automation could easily become a financial headache.

This video provides a great overview of the Front inbox, which is the platform you'll need to adopt to use their AI features.

The flexible alternative: Getting started with eesel AI

If you're sold on the idea of AI but are hesitant about Front's "our way or the highway" approach and its limitations, there's a much easier way to get started.

eesel AI is built to be a smart AI layer that works with the tools you already use. Whether your team lives in Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, or another help desk, you don’t have to switch platforms to get great automation.

Here’s what sets eesel AI apart:

• Go live in minutes: It’s a completely self-serve platform. You can connect your help desk and knowledge sources and see it working in a few minutes, no sales call required.

• Unify all your knowledge: It was built from day one to connect to both public and private sources like Confluence and Google Docs. It also learns from your past support tickets right away.

• Predictable pricing: The plans are simple, clear, and don't have any surprise per-resolution charges. You know exactly what you’re paying each month.

Ready to add powerful, flexible AI to your existing help desk without all the hassle? Try eesel AI for free and see what you can automate in the next few minutes.