A practical guide to Front AI tagging

If you've ever found yourself staring at a shared inbox that looks like a digital yard sale of untagged emails, you know the feeling. It's a never-ending chore to keep things organized, get requests to the right person, and just figure out what customers are asking for. Trying to manually tag hundreds of conversations every day is a recipe for burnout. It’s tedious, inconsistent, and pulls your team away from what they should be doing: actually helping people.

This is where AI-powered tagging steps in, promising to bring some sanity back to the chaos. Front, the popular customer communication hub, has its own tool for this called AI Tagging. In this guide, we’ll walk you through what Front AI Tagging is, how to get it running, and, more importantly, where its blind spots might have you looking for something with a bit more horsepower.

What is Front AI Tagging?

At its core, Front AI Tagging is a feature that automatically sticks tags on your incoming emails. It’s currently in a closed beta and uses AI to scan the subject and body of a message to guess which categories it belongs to. The whole point is to save you from the mind-numbing task of manual organization, keep your tagging consistent, and give you better data to look at in your reports.

Think of it as a bouncer for your inbox. Instead of an agent having to read an email and manually add tags like "Billing Question" or "Bug Report," the AI takes the first crack at it. The system works by having an administrator set up a bunch of rules and write out detailed descriptions for each tag. The AI then uses these descriptions as its study guide, learning what kind of message gets what kind of tag. It's one of several AI tools Front offers, many of which are paid add-ons or only available on their pricier plans.

How to set up Front AI Tagging

Getting Front AI Tagging going isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It takes some real administrative effort and a hands-on training period to get the AI up to speed. Let's break down what that looks like.

Step 1: Create an AI tagging rule

First, an admin has to dive into the settings and find the rules library. From there, you'll pick the "Tag with AI prompt" template. This is where you'll name your rule and decide which shared inboxes it should work in. You can also add other conditions to fine-tune when the rule kicks in, but the real setup happens in the next step.

Step 2: Select tags and write descriptions

This is where the real work begins. The performance of Front's AI pretty much lives or dies by how well you describe your tags. For every tag you want the AI to handle (like "Password Reset" or "Shipping Inquiry"), you need to write a super clear, specific description that tells the AI exactly when to use it.

Front’s own advice suggests a good description should:

• Be direct and detailed. For example, "Use this tag for any email asking about invoice status, payment methods, or billing errors."

• Explain when not to use the tag. This helps prevent the AI from getting confused and applying the wrong label.

• Remember the AI is only reading the text. It can't see who the sender is, what's in an attachment, or any other context outside the email's subject and body.

Crafting dozens of these descriptions is a serious upfront time commitment. You have to anticipate every possible customer question and translate your team's unwritten rules into instructions a machine can follow.

Step 3: The manual training process

Once your descriptions are ready, you can't just set the AI loose on your inbox. You have to train it. Front will show you old emails that it thinks match each tag, and an admin has to go through them, one by one, to approve or reject the AI's suggestion.

And here's the kicker: for a single tag to become fully automatic, you have to manually approve 10 example emails. If you want to automate 30 different tags, that's 300 manual clicks you have to perform before the system even begins to work on its own. This training phase is a huge bottleneck and doesn't even guarantee the AI will know what to do with new types of emails it’s never seen before.

Use cases and limitations of Front AI Tagging

After you’ve put in all that setup work, Front AI Tagging can be helpful. But it's good to have a realistic picture of what it can and can’t do.

Key Front AI Tagging benefits and use cases

• Getting your inbox in order. The most obvious win is a cleaner, more organized inbox. Conversations get automatically sorted by topic ("Billing," "Feature Request") or urgency ("Urgent"), making it way easier to see what’s going on.

• Routing tickets faster. As soon as a tag is applied, you can use it to kick off other rules in Front. For instance, any email tagged "Technical Issue" could be automatically sent to your engineering support team, getting it to the right eyes much faster.

• Better analytics. With consistent tags, your reports suddenly become a lot more useful. You can easily see trends, like a jump in bug reports after a new feature launch or a common question that tells you your help center needs an update.

Important Front AI Tagging limitations to consider

While the benefits are there, the feature's shortcomings show up fast, especially for teams trying to automate their support in a meaningful way.

• It only learns from email text. The AI can't see what's inside an attachment, understand an image, or analyze the content of a link. If a customer sends a screenshot of an error message, all that vital context is ignored, which often leads to the wrong tag or no tag at all.

• Its knowledge is trapped. The AI is stuck inside your Front inbox. It can't learn from your company's actual sources of truth, like a knowledge base in Confluence, internal guides in Google Docs, or your complete history of solved tickets. This means it can never build a deep, contextual understanding of your business.

• Setup is slow and doesn't scale. That manual training process of approving 10 examples for every single tag is a massive hurdle. A system like eesel AI, in contrast, learns from your entire ticket history automatically. It can be up and running with much higher accuracy in minutes, not days of clicking.

• It only applies tags. The tool's job stops there. It can't take the next step and actually do something, like close a duplicate ticket, update a customer's info, or look up an order status in Shopify. It’s an organization tool, not an automation tool.

Front AI Tagging pricing

Front AI Tagging is in a closed beta right now, so it’s free for testers. But if we look at Front's general pricing, we can guess where this is headed. Most of their advanced AI features aren't part of the standard plans.

Features like AI Copilot and Smart QA are usually sold as add-ons, running an extra $10 to $20 per seat, per month. To get them included, you often have to be on their high-end Enterprise plan, which starts at $105 per seat, per month. This à la carte approach can make your costs climb quickly and become unpredictable, especially as your team grows.

A more powerful Front AI Tagging alternative: eesel AI

Front AI Tagging is a decent first step for basic organization, but for teams who are serious about automation, it's just scratching the surface. The limits on its knowledge, setup, and abilities mean you'll hit a ceiling pretty quickly. This is where a dedicated AI platform like eesel AI really shines.

• It connects to everything, not just your inbox. Where Front is stuck with email text, eesel AI plugs into all your knowledge sources. It integrates with over 100 tools, including Zendesk, Confluence, Slack, and Google Docs. This gives it a complete picture of your business, leading to far more accurate and helpful actions.

This infographic shows how eesel AI connects with multiple knowledge sources, a key alternative feature to the more limited Front AI Tagging.

• It learns instantly, no manual training needed. Forget the tedious process of approving examples one by one. eesel’s AI Agent trains on your entire ticket history in minutes. It immediately gets your brand voice, common problems, and best solutions, saving you hours of setup.

This image displays the eesel AI interface connecting to various business applications, highlighting the automated training process that contrasts with Front AI Tagging's manual setup.

• It automates workflows, not just tags. eesel AI does way more than just sort conversations. Its workflow engine can automatically triage tickets, update fields, look up order information, and even fully resolve common customer issues on its own, all without ever leaving your current helpdesk.

This diagram illustrates a complete support automation workflow in eesel AI, going far beyond the simple tagging offered by Front AI Tagging.

• You can test with confidence and see clear pricing. With eesel AI, you can run simulations on thousands of your past tickets to see exactly how the AI will perform and calculate your potential ROI before you go live. Plus, our pricing is straightforward. We don't charge per resolution, so your costs are always predictable and you aren't penalized for having a busy month.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which allows teams to test automation performance before implementation, a feature not available with Front AI Tagging.

Here’s a quick side-by-side look:

Feature	Front AI Tagging	eesel AI
Knowledge Sources	Email subject & body only	100+ integrations (Helpdesk, Docs, Slack, etc.)
Setup & Training	Manual (approve 10 emails per tag)	Fully automated (learns from all past tickets)
Capabilities	Applies tags	Applies tags, triages, takes custom actions, drafts replies, resolves tickets
Pre-launch Testing	None	Powerful simulation mode on historical data
Pricing Model	Beta (future cost unknown), other AI features are add-ons	Transparent, feature-inclusive plans

The verdict on Front AI Tagging

So, what's the verdict on Front AI Tagging? It’s a handy feature for teams just dipping their toes into automation who need a simple way to organize their inbox. However, the slow manual setup, limited knowledge, and narrow functionality make it more of a stepping stone than a long-term, scalable solution.

For teams that want to go beyond basic organization and really tap into what AI can do, a more complete platform is the way to go. By connecting to all your company knowledge and automating entire workflows, you can free up your team to focus on the work that truly matters and give your customers a better experience.

Ready to move past basic tagging and start automating your support? Try eesel AI for free and see how our AI agents can start resolving tickets in minutes.