Gorgias AI Agent on social channels: setup, limits and cost

TL;DR

Gorgias AI Agent answers Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and nothing else on social: not public comments, mentions or TikTok. You turn it on under Deploy, then Socials, on any plan with AI Agent, once the Meta integration is connected. It can reply for 24 hours after a shopper's message, and it hands off videos, voice notes and files. A fully resolved DM can trigger both a ticket fee and an automated-interaction fee. For comments and drafted replies in Gorgias, eesel's helpdesk teammate fills the gap, and with the eesel CLI an AI coding agent can upload approved knowledge and test answers while an admin still approves the Gorgias connection.

Why does social need its own rules?

I'm on eesel's customer support team, and the thing I notice first about social queues is how little of the volume is a real question. A story reaction, an ad comment, a photo with no text, a "price?" under a video. A bot that is sound on email can still make a mess here, so the details of what Gorgias's AI Agent does on each channel matter more than the headline.

Gorgias announced AI Agent on Socials on July 13, 2026, calling it zero setup because your existing knowledge, guidance and actions carry over. The channels it names are Instagram and Facebook Messenger, and the docs add WhatsApp.

What does it do on each channel?

Here is the map I built from the Gorgias docs, on 2026-11-12.

Instagram DMs and Messenger. A DM becomes a ticket, tagged into your existing AI Agent views, and AI Agent answers with your skills, knowledge and tone of voice. Gorgias adapts the tone to short chat messages automatically, which suits a multilingual shopper base too, and you can add channel-specific tone instructions if you want more control. My Gorgias AI guidance notes show how that instruction layer works.

WhatsApp. The same setup applies (see also AI for WhatsApp support), with one extra: for product questions AI Agent can reply with a carousel of up to three product cards, each with an Add to cart button that opens a pre-filled Shopify cart. The two required phrases come in the shopper's first detected language, from a list of ten, otherwise English. I covered the connection side in my Gorgias WhatsApp guide.

Comments. This is the gap people miss. The docs say AI Agent "doesn't moderate or reply to public posts, mentions, or comments." Your team can still reply to a comment publicly, or privately through Messenger or Instagram DM, and that private reply opens a new DM ticket.

TikTok. Gorgias has a free TikTok Shop app built by TikTok Shop, available only in the US and in English per its doc. It puts shop chats and order data in the ticket sidebar, and it excludes DMs and comments. I found no page saying AI Agent replies there.

How do you set it up?

You need three things first: a Facebook business page, a professional Instagram account in the same Meta business portfolio, and AI Agent already set up with knowledge and tone. Only the account owner and admins (see roles and permissions) can connect the Meta app, and they need full access to the business portfolio.

1. In the app store, install Facebook, Messenger & Instagram, log in with Facebook and accept all permissions.
2. Toggle the pages you want and pick which activity creates tickets. You can import 30 days of Facebook posts and comments as closed tickets, once. Instagram history is not imported.
3. If you run several stores, assign each page to its store (my guide to multiple brands helps), because one integration can only be watched by AI Agent for one store.
4. Open AI Agent, then Deploy, then Socials. Choose the integrations, flip Enable AI Agent on Socials and save. Owner, Admin and Lead roles can do this.
5. Before the switch, test in the Playground by picking Instagram DM or Facebook Messenger as the channel. Those tests are not billable and the reasoning panel shows which skill or knowledge produced each answer.

Two settings are worth a minute. Respond to image-only messages is on by default, and Gorgias warns that answers from a bare image "may be less accurate than usual." The initial message footer adds an AI disclosure to the first reply, which Gorgias recommends and notes may be a legal requirement where you operate. My AI support testing notes explain why I would rehearse a few weird DMs first.

What happens inside a conversation?

• Identity. For an order question, AI Agent recognizes a shopper whose social account is already linked to a profile. Otherwise it asks for the order email or phone, sends a 6-digit code that expires after 10 minutes, and links the account after a correct code. A wrong or expired code hands the chat to your team.
• Media. It reads photos and works well alongside a clean knowledge base. Video, voice notes and documents with no text go straight to a person, and it cannot send attachments itself.
• Taking over. Replying from the Instagram or Messenger app does not stop it. Reply from the Gorgias inbox and it stops on that ticket.
• Not available. Flows, Order Management and customer engagement features are built for Gorgias Chat, so they are off on social.
• Reactions. A thumbs-up on a story creates a ticket but gets no reply. An AI spam filter or a rule can close or route these.

The 24-hour rule is the one that surprises teams. AI Agent can reply only within 24 hours of the shopper's last message, while human agents get 7 days on Messenger and Instagram. Reply limits for people are 2,000 characters on Messenger and 1,000 on Instagram, and an Instagram message with both text and an image fails, so send them separately. See my AI agent handoff notes and Gorgias's own handover controls for planning.

Meta's commerce policies also apply. The Gorgias FAQ says AI Agent cannot be used with goods in certain regulated categories, including medical devices, medications, alcohol and tobacco.

Which plans and prices apply?

The docs say all plans with AI Agent, and they describe no separate social fee or add-on. Prices below are from the Gorgias pricing page on 2026-11-12.

The billing rule matters more for DMs than the plan price. Per the billing doc, a ticket is billable once a message goes out from the helpdesk, and Messenger, Instagram DMs and WhatsApp count. An interaction is automated when the shopper needs no human within 72 hours, and a ticket fully resolved by AI Agent can carry both a ticket fee and an automation fee. A handoff incurs only the ticket fee. A reply sent directly in the Instagram app does not create a billable ticket.

The page also contradicts itself on the automation overage: the plan cards say $1.50 per automated interaction, and the compare table says $1.00, $0.90, $0.90 and $0.85 for Starter through Advanced. Take a Pro brand where AI Agent fully resolves 300 DMs a month, with nothing else using the allowance. That is 110 over the 190 included: $165 at the card rate, $99 at the table rate, a $66 gap. Ticket overage on Pro is $0.36 and 300 tickets fit inside the 2,000 included. Ask Gorgias which number your contract uses. My Gorgias AI pricing and cost per resolution pieces go deeper.

Reviewers describe the ticket-based model both ways, though not about social specifically:

"The main frustration with Gorgias is the pricing model, which is based on ticket volume rather than a flat monthly fee."

Mitchell O., VP of Sales, G2

"The pricing model fits a collaborative business environment, because charging per ticket instead of per user allowed nearly everyone in our company to use it freely."

Frank A., Head of Digital, Capterra

I found no independent write-ups of AI Agent on Instagram or Messenger on Hacker News, G2 or Capterra. Reddit and LinkedIn were not retrievable in this run, so treat the channel behavior above as documented, not field-tested.

Where do Gorgias's own pages disagree?

None of this is sinister, since the feature shipped in July and the billing doc probably predates it. I also wrote about running Meta's support AI next to Gorgias. If you buy for the social use case, check Playground and your bill in the first week. See also how AI Agent 2.0 changed in 2026 for other drift.

Where does eesel fit for a Gorgias team?

Gorgias's AI Agent covers one slice of social: live DMs, inside 24 hours, which helps your first response time. eesel's AI helpdesk teammate works on the tickets Gorgias creates, whatever channel they came from, and it can tag, draft or reply depending on how you set it up. I would keep one responder per channel, so pick AI Agent or eesel for live DMs and use the other where it fills a gap.

Here is what that looks like in practice.

• Rúngne, a Norwegian climbing brand with a big social following, runs three eesel agents on Gorgias. In one month eesel handled about 2,100 tickets across email, chat and social, and its triage agent tags and closes Instagram and Facebook comments, story mentions and other noise, with social-lead and social-question tags for the real ones. That is the comment gap AI Agent leaves open.
• Question Beauty gets short messages from Messenger, email and chat in Gorgias, answered in the shopper's language, and eesel looked up about 290 Shopify orders in a month. Refunds and complaints go to a person with a note, a pattern I cover in AI escalation.
• Poseidon Animal Health drafts replies in Gorgias with the eesel browser extension, keeping social replies short and email replies fuller, and a person sends every reply.

Before any of this goes live, test answers against approved knowledge such as exported help center articles and macros, because uploaded knowledge is not ready until the answers pass your tests. My notes on coaching an AI agent and an AI knowledge base audit cover that habit, and Gorgias's own assistant for tuning AI Agent is Gorgias Gaia.

Try eesel in Gorgias

If your Instagram and Messenger queue is mostly comments, reactions and "price?" messages, a responder that only handles 24-hour DMs leaves a lot on the table. eesel plugs into Gorgias, learns from your help center and past tickets, tags and closes the noise, drafts replies as internal notes and waits for your team to send. Start with the eesel Gorgias integration, or compare Gorgias AI Agent alternatives first.

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