How to create a Freshdesk AI agent: A step-by-step guide

If you’re running a support team, you’re probably all too familiar with the endless stream of repetitive questions. They’re necessary to answer, but they can really bog down your team, pulling them away from the trickier issues where they’re needed most. This is where AI agents come in, promising to handle the simple stuff so your team can focus.

Freshdesk has its own AI, called Freddy AI, built to do just that. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to create a Freshdesk AI agent using their native tools. But we’ll also show you a much faster and more powerful way to get an AI agent live, one that connects to all your company’s knowledge and gives you full control.

How to create Freshdesk AI: What you’ll need to get started

Before we dive in, let’s make sure you have everything ready. Setting up an AI agent in Freshdesk isn’t complicated, but you’ll need a few things in place first.

• Admin access to your Freshdesk account: This is a must. You’ll need to be an administrator to create new agents and play with the AI settings.

• A supported Freshdesk plan: The Freddy AI features we’re talking about are available on the Pro and Enterprise plans. If you’re on the free or Growth plan, your access will be limited or non-existent.

• A knowledge base: Your AI needs something to learn from. This means having your solution articles, FAQs, and other help docs set up within Freshdesk.

• A clear idea of what to automate: It helps to have a goal in mind. Are you trying to deflect common "how-to" questions? Or maybe handle simple information requests? Start with a specific target.

How to create Freshdesk AI using native tools

Freshdesk’s built-in AI, Freddy, lets you build AI agents to field customer questions. The whole process boils down to creating a dedicated user for your AI, telling it what to learn and how to act, and then turning on features like the Email AI Agent.

Let’s get into the details.

Step 1: Create a new agent user

First things first, you need to create a "user" that will act as your AI agent. Think of it as giving your bot its own login. This makes it easy to track what the AI is doing separately from your human agents.

1. Head over to the Admin panel in your Freshdesk dashboard.

2. Under the "Team" section, click on Agents.

3. Hit the New agent button.

4. Fill in the details for your new bot. It’s a good idea to give it a clear name like "AI Support Bot" or something similar. You’ll need to give it an email address and set its role. You might need to make it an Administrator to give it access to all the automation rules it needs.

5. Define the agent’s scope to control which tickets it can access.

6. Click Create agent, and you’re done with step one.

Step 2: Configure knowledge sources and persona

Now that your AI agent has a profile, it’s time to send it to school. AI agents learn from the knowledge sources you feed them.

1. In the Admin panel, find AI Agents and Chatbots.

2. Click Create new, give your bot a name, and choose the AI Agent option.

3. Under the Knowledge sources tab, you can add website URLs, upload files (like .txt, .docx, or .pdf), or connect your existing Freshdesk solution articles.

4. Next, hop over to the Persona tab. This is where you can give your AI some personality. You can set its name, avatar, and tone of voice. You can also give it specific instructions, like when it should give up and pass a conversation over to a human.

Step 3: Set up the Email AI Agent

One of the most useful parts of Freshdesk’s AI is the Email AI Agent, which can automatically reply to incoming email tickets.

1. Go to Admin > Freddy > Self Service > Email AI Agent and click Configure.

2. Set up trigger conditions: This is where you lay down the law for your bot. You create rules that tell it which tickets to respond to. For example, you could set it to only handle tickets with the status "Open" or tickets that come from a specific customer group. You can mix and match these conditions too.

3. Manage languages: Pick the languages your AI agent should speak. Your account’s main language is the default, but you can add more if you have knowledge base articles in other languages.

4. Edit the email response template: You’ll want to customize the email your AI sends out. It’s really important to include the {{freddy_articles}} and {{freddy_answers}} placeholders, since this is how the AI actually pulls answers from your knowledge base into the reply.

Once you’ve got all that configured, you can save and turn on your AI agent. It’s a solid process, but it can take a while to get right, and you might bump up against some limitations, especially with knowledge sources and the lack of a good way to test it.

How to create Freshdesk AI in minutes: A faster way

Okay, so the native setup is a decent starting point. But what if you could launch an AI that’s smarter, easier to manage, and learns from all your company knowledge, not just what lives inside Freshdesk? And what if you could do it in minutes?

That’s exactly what eesel AI is for.

eesel AI is a platform built to plug straight into helpdesks like Freshdesk, so you don’t have to change how you work. It’s designed to be completely self-serve, putting you in the driver’s seat.

Step 1: Connect Freshdesk and your knowledge in one click

Instead of manually creating users and fiddling with rules, getting started with eesel AI is ridiculously simple.

1. Sign up for eesel AI: You can get started for free, no sales call required.

2. Connect Freshdesk: Just authenticate your Freshdesk account with a single click. eesel AI integrates right away without any messy API work.

3. Connect all your knowledge sources: This is where eesel AI is a completely different beast. Forget being limited to just help center articles. You can connect Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, Slack, past tickets, and over 100 other apps. The AI learns from everything, which means it gets the full picture and gives much more accurate answers.

Step 2: Customize your AI agent’s workflow and persona

eesel AI provides a simple but powerful prompt editor and workflow builder so you can define exactly how your AI should behave.

• Selective Automation: You can create rules to decide which tickets the AI should even touch. It’s easy to start small, maybe by only automating your most basic "Tier 1" questions and having the AI escalate everything else.

• Custom Persona & Actions: Use the prompt editor to dial in the AI’s tone and personality. Even better, you can tell it to perform custom actions, like looking up an order status in Shopify or updating ticket fields directly in Freshdesk.

• Scoped Knowledge: You can easily tell the AI to only use specific knowledge sources for certain types of questions, making sure it stays on topic.

Step 3: Simulate performance and go live with confidence

One of the scariest parts of launching an AI is not knowing how it will actually perform with live customers. eesel AI fixes this with a really neat simulation mode.

• Test on historical tickets: Before you let your AI talk to a single customer, you can test it on thousands of your past Freshdesk tickets.

• Preview responses and forecast ROI: The simulation shows you exactly how the AI would have replied to those old tickets. This gives you a clear forecast of your resolution rate and how much money you’ll save. It lets you tweak and tune the AI until you’re completely confident to go live.

You can do all of this, from signing up to having a fully tested AI ready to launch, in just a few minutes. Not days or weeks.

Feature	Native Freshdesk AI (Freddy)	eesel AI
Setup Time	Hours to days; requires manual setup	Minutes; completely self-serve
Knowledge Sources	Limited to Freshdesk articles, URLs, files	100+ integrations (Confluence, Google Docs, etc.)
Custom Actions	Limited to basic automation rules	Fully customizable actions (API calls, ticket updates)
Pre-Launch Testing	No simulation mode; you have to test live	Powerful simulation on your historical tickets
Control	Fairly rigid automation rules	Fine-grained control over which tickets to automate

This video explains how to use Freddy AI to generate knowledge base articles, a key step in how to create Freshdesk AI.

How to create Freshdesk AI: Common mistakes to avoid

No matter which tool you use, launching an AI agent isn’t something you should rush into. To save you some headaches, here are a few common tripwires to watch out for.

• Not having a clear goal: Don’t just switch on AI because it’s the trendy thing to do. Figure out the top 3-5 repetitive questions that are eating up your team’s time and target those first. A focused approach gets you real results, faster.

• Forgetting about your knowledge base: Your AI is only as good as the information it learns from. If your help docs are outdated or incomplete, your AI is going to give bad answers. It’s that simple.

  • How eesel AI helps: eesel AI can spot gaps in your knowledge. It can even generate draft help articles based on successful ticket resolutions, making it easy to fill those gaps with answers you know already work.

• Launching without testing: Turning on an AI without knowing how it will behave is a recipe for disaster. You risk giving customers wrong information, which just leads to more frustration.

  • How eesel AI helps: The simulation mode is your safety net. It lets you test and perfect your AI on your own historical data, so you know it’s ready for prime time.

• Having no escape hatch: Your AI won’t be able to answer everything, and that’s okay. What’s not okay is trapping a customer in a loop with a bot. Make sure there’s a clear and easy way for customers to get to a human agent, and that your AI knows when to hand off the conversation.

Beyond how to create Freshdesk AI: Get more from your bot

Putting an AI agent to work in Freshdesk can be a huge win for scaling your support and making your team more efficient. While the native Freddy AI gives you some basic tools to get started, its limits on knowledge sources, customization, and testing can hold you back.

For teams that want to move fast and have full control, a solution like eesel AI is a much more powerful and flexible option. By connecting all your knowledge, giving you precise control, and providing a risk-free way to test everything, you can launch a far smarter AI agent in a tiny fraction of the time. You get all the perks of automation without being boxed into a rigid system.

Ready to see how fast you can upgrade your Freshdesk support? Start your free eesel AI trial today and you could have your first AI agent live in minutes.