A deep dive into Help Scout AI features (and their limitations) in 2025

Let's be real, AI has quickly shifted from a "cool-to-have" gadget to a core part of any customer support team's toolkit. It’s all about helping your team work smarter, not just harder. Help Scout, a familiar name in the customer service space, has brought its own AI tools to the table, and they're reporting that teams using them are resolving 36% more emails.

But what do these tools actually do behind the marketing curtain? And, more importantly, where do they hit their limits? This post is a straightforward, no-fluff breakdown of the specific Help Scout AI features. We'll dig into what they do well, where the official documentation shows they might fall short, and how they compare to more dedicated automation platforms.

What are the Help Scout AI features?

Help Scout’s AI isn’t one single, all-powerful bot. Instead, it’s a set of four different tools powered by the OpenAI API service. Each one is built to either give your agents a hand or let your customers find answers on their own.

You can pretty much split them into two groups:

• Agent-facing tools: These are your team's secret weapons, designed to speed up their work. This includes AI Assist and AI Summarize.

• Customer-facing tools: These are for your customers, aiming to answer questions before they even reach an agent. This includes AI Answers and AI Drafts.

Because these features are built right into the Help Scout platform, they're easy to access if you're already a customer. But as we'll get into, that convenience might come with a few trade-offs.

Agent-facing Help Scout AI features: Making your team more efficient

These tools are all about giving your support agents a bit of a superpower. They won’t cut down the number of tickets you receive, but they are designed to make handling each one a little faster and more consistent.

AI Assist and AI Summarize: Inside the agent-facing tools

Think of AI Assist as a grammar and style checker that’s had a lot of coffee. When an agent is typing a reply, they can highlight the text and use AI Assist to:

• Clean up spelling and grammar.

• Adjust the tone to be more casual or formal.

• Trim the text down or expand on it.

• Translate a reply into more than a dozen languages.

AI Summarize tackles a different headache: getting caught up on those long, back-and-forth email threads. With one click, it scans the whole conversation and spits out a simple, bulleted summary of everything that's happened so far.

But here's what to keep in mind:

These tools only assist. An agent still needs to be in the ticket, reading, and doing the actual work. They help improve the quality of a reply, but they don't reduce the quantity of tickets needing attention.

• Pro Tip: According to Help Scout's own documentation, AI Summarize has a couple of interesting quirks. It can only create summaries in English, regardless of the conversation's original language. Also, if a customer replies to the thread again, you have to remember to click and update the summary yourself, it doesn’t refresh automatically.

While these are handy for a quick polish, they don’t write the reply for you. An AI Copilot, like the one from eesel, takes this a step further. It learns from all of your company's knowledge sources, like private Google Docs and past support tickets, to draft a complete, context-aware response from scratch.

Customer-facing Help Scout AI features: The self-service options

This is where the AI starts to handle customer questions on its own, with the goal of deflecting common queries and giving your team some breathing room.

AI Answers: The self-service chatbot

AI Answers is Help Scout’s chatbot. It lives inside their Beacon widget on your site and provides conversational answers to customer questions, 24/7.

So, where does it get its smarts? It pulls information from two main places: your public Help Scout Docs knowledge base and any other public website you tell it to look at. It can even read PDFs and Word documents it finds on those public sites.

But here's what to keep in mind:

• The public knowledge gap: This is a big one. The chatbot's knowledge is completely limited to what you’ve published publicly. It can't see any of your secure, internal information from places like private Confluence pages, internal Google Docs, or your team's history of support tickets. If the answer isn't on a public webpage, the AI is stuck. This can be a major hurdle for any business that prefers not to post all its internal procedures online. This visual breaks down the difference between a public-only and an integrated knowledge base.

• Data privacy questions: Help Scout is open about the fact that because this feature uses OpenAI, your customer conversation data is sent to OpenAI and stored for up to 30 days for monitoring. For companies with strict security policies or compliance requirements, this could be a non-starter.

• It can't take action: AI Answers is great at finding information, but it can't actually do anything. It can't check an order status in your backend system, process a refund, or assign a ticket to a specific agent. It's strictly a read-only tool.

For genuine automation, you need an AI that can access all your knowledge, no matter where it's stored. Platforms like eesel AI are built with this in mind. They connect securely to over 120 sources, including your private Google Docs, internal wikis, and your helpdesk’s entire ticket history. This allows them to give accurate answers and even take action on a customer's behalf, without you having to make sensitive info public.

AI Drafts: Proactive suggestions

Born from Help Scout's acquisition of SupportAgent.ai, AI Drafts works by automatically generating a complete reply to a customer's email. It learns from your team's past conversations and help articles to try and match the right tone and information. An agent then opens the ticket, looks over the draft, makes any needed tweaks, and sends it off.

But here's what to keep in mind:

While this can save a ton of time on typing, it isn't full automation. A human agent still has to open, review, and send every single response. The workflow still depends on a person for every ticket, which means it doesn't really lower the number of tickets in your team's queue.

This is a key difference from an autonomous tool like eesel's AI Agent. An AI Agent can be configured to manage your frontline support by itself, automatically replying to and closing out common questions without a human ever getting involved. For tougher issues, it can triage the ticket by adding the right tags and routing it to the right person, so your agents only spend time on conversations that genuinely need their expertise.

Pricing for Help Scout AI features

Help Scout has switched to a usage-based pricing model. This means you’re charged based on the number of unique "contacts" (customers) your team helps each month, not by how many agents you have. The AI features are included in all plans, but some of the more powerful automation tools are reserved for the higher-priced tiers.

Plan	Price (Monthly Billing)	Included Contacts	Key AI-Related Features & Limitations
Free	$0/month	Up to 50/month	Shared Inbox, AI Answers, Unlimited AI Drafts.
Standard	$50/month	Starts at 100/month	Everything in Free + Advanced Reports, Surveys.
Plus	$75/month	Starts at 100/month	Everything in Standard + Advanced Workflows, Teams.
Pro	Custom Pricing	Starts at 1,000/month	Higher Limits, Dedicated Onboarding.

But here's what to keep in mind:

• The "per-contact" model can make your monthly costs a bit unpredictable. If you have a particularly busy month or a single customer reaches out with several different problems, your bill could go up without warning.

• Important automation tools, like the "Advanced Workflows" feature, are only available on the more expensive "Plus" plan.

For more stable budgeting, a model based on interactions can often be a better fit. For example, eesel's pricing is based on a set number of AI interactions per month. This gives you clear, tiered plans that don't charge you more for having multiple chats with the same customer.

The verdict on Help Scout AI features: Good for assisting, not for automating

The Help Scout AI features are a nice addition for teams that are already using and happy with the Help Scout platform. They're quite good at assisting agents, helping them write clearer replies, find information faster, and handle basic questions with a few fewer clicks.

But if you're looking for true, hands-off automation, the limitations start to show:

1. It relies on public knowledge: AI Answers is held back because it can only access public-facing information. This is a pretty big constraint on how smart and useful it can actually be.

2. It's not autonomous: These features are designed to be copilots, not pilots. Every ticket still needs a human to review, send, or close it.

3. It's locked into the platform: These tools only work inside Help Scout. If your team uses a different helpdesk like Zendesk or Freshdesk, you won't be able to use them.

Ready for AI that works with the tools you already have?

If you're after an AI solution that can provide real automation, connect securely to your private company knowledge, and integrate with the helpdesk you already use, you'll probably need a more flexible tool.

eesel AI is designed to plug directly into the most popular helpdesks, including Zendesk and Freshdesk, giving your team a more powerful set of tools:

• An AI Agent that can actually resolve and close frontline support tickets on its own.

• An AI Copilot that learns from all your company knowledge, not just what's on your public website.

• AI Triage that automatically tags, routes, and keeps your ticket queue organized.

See how eesel can boost your existing helpdesk. You can run a free simulation on your past tickets or book a demo to find out more.