How to enable Freddy AI in Freshdesk: A 2025 guide

If you’re running your support on Freshdesk, you’ve probably seen prompts about Freddy AI. It’s Freshdesk’s own artificial intelligence, built to help automate common questions, give your agents a hand, and pull useful trends out of your support data. It can be a seriously helpful tool when it’s set up right.

This guide is here to walk you through exactly that: how to enable and configure the different pieces of Freddy AI. We’ll cover what you need to have ready, the steps to turn it on, and how to tweak the settings. Freddy is a capable system, but getting it to work well means finding your way through a few different menus and components. Let’s get into it.

Prerequisites for enabling Freddy AI in Freshdesk

Before you jump into the settings, let’s get a few things sorted out first. A little prep now will save you from a lot of clicking around and head-scratching later.

• A Freshdesk account: This might seem obvious, but you’ll need to be on the right plan. Most of Freddy AI’s more advanced features, like the AI Copilot and some AI Agent functions, are only available on the Pro or Enterprise plans. It’s worth double-checking your subscription before you start.

• Admin permissions: You’ll need to be an administrator for your Freshdesk account to access the backend and change any of the AI settings. If you’re not, you’ll have to ask someone who is.

• An existing knowledge base: Freddy AI isn’t magic; it learns directly from your Freshdesk solution articles. The better your knowledge base, the smarter Freddy will be. If your help docs are gathering dust or are incomplete, the AI’s answers will be just as unhelpful.

Understanding the components of Freddy AI

One of the first things to get your head around is that "Freddy AI" isn’t a single on/off switch. Think of it more like a toolkit with a few different pieces inside. Each one does something different, and you’ll need to set them up individually. It gives you some flexibility, but it also means you’ve got a few different areas to poke around in.

Here’s a quick rundown of what’s in the box:

• Freddy AI Agent: This is the bot your customers will talk to. It can live in your chat widget or reply to emails, dishing out automated answers it learned from your knowledge base. The whole point is to resolve simple tickets so your human agents don’t have to.

• Freddy Copilot: This one is for your team. Instead of chatting with customers, the Copilot acts as an assistant for your agents. It can summarize long ticket threads, suggest replies, and even help agents rephrase their responses to be clearer.

• Freddy Insights: This is the analytics engine of the bunch. It crunches your support data to find trends and highlight recurring issues, giving you a heads-up on problems before they get out of hand.

Each of these has its own setup area inside Freshdesk, which we’ll tackle next.

How to enable Freddy AI in Freshdesk: A complete walkthrough

Alright, let’s get our hands dirty. Follow these steps to get Freddy AI up and running in your Freshdesk account.

Step 1: Find the main settings

First things first, you need to get to the main control panel for all things Freddy.

Log into your Freshdesk account and click the Admin gear icon. In the sidebar, look for a section called Freddy AI, and then click on Freddy. This is the central hub where you can turn the main features on or off. For some accounts, especially if you’re on Freshdesk Omni, the path might be a little different, but it will always live somewhere in the Admin settings.

Step 2: Set up the AI Agent

Just flipping the AI Agent switch to "on" won’t do much. The real work is in teaching it how to be useful. This is probably where you’ll spend most of your setup time.

• Connect your knowledge sources: The AI Agent needs content to answer questions. You have to connect it to your knowledge sources, which for the most part will be your Freshdesk solution articles. You can also point it to public web pages or upload files, but there are some constraints. For example, you can only add 10 URLs per agent, which can be a real pain if your documentation is spread across different sites.

• Give it a persona: You can give your bot a name, an avatar, and some guidance on its tone of voice. This little touch helps the AI feel more like a part of your brand and less like a generic, faceless robot.

• Teach it some "Skills": If you want your bot to do more than just answer questions (like checking an order status or processing a refund), you’ll have to configure what Freshdesk calls "Skills." This is a more advanced feature that lets the bot follow multi-step processes, but honestly, it can get pretty technical to set up.

Step 3: Turn on the Copilot

Next up is the Copilot, the tool built to assist your human agents. You’ll usually find these settings in their own section under Admin > Freddy AI > AI Copilot.

One of its handiest features is the Reply Suggester. When you turn this on, Freddy will draft replies for agents based on your help articles. Just be aware of its limits: it only works for tickets coming in via email or your support portal, and it only offers a suggestion for the customer’s very first message.

Step 4: Activate Insights

Finally, you can switch on Freddy Insights to start collecting data. Once it’s enabled, don’t expect instant gratification. According to Freshworks, it can take up to 24 hours before it has enough data to show you the first batch of insights. This is yet another separate area you’ll need to check back on to see what Freddy has learned about your support trends.

Tips and common mistakes

Setting up any AI can feel a bit like navigating a maze. Here are a few tips to keep you on the right path and help you sidestep some common tripwires.

• Start small: It’s easy to get excited and want to turn on every single feature at once, but that’s usually a recipe for chaos. Pick one or two simple, common questions you get all the time and train the AI Agent to handle only those. Once it’s doing a good job, you can slowly give it more responsibility.

• Clean up your knowledge base first: I know we already mentioned this, but it’s worth saying again. Your AI is only as good as the information it learns from. If your help articles are outdated, confusing, or just plain wrong, the AI will confidently give your customers bad answers. Take the time to audit and update your docs before you let the bot loose on them.

• Don’t underestimate the setup time: This is a big one. It’s easy to look at a few on/off toggles and think you can have a fully functioning AI assistant by the end of the day. The reality is that going from "enabled" to "actually helpful" takes a good amount of time. It involves a lot of configuration, testing, and tweaking across several different screens.

This is where the whole thing can become a bigger project than you planned for. For teams that just want to get AI working quickly without a massive setup process, Freddy’s separate modules can feel a bit disconnected.

A simpler alternative

If all that sounds like a bit of a project, you’re not wrong. For teams that want the benefits of AI in Freshdesk without the tangled, multi-step configuration, there’s another way.

A tool like eesel AI is built for exactly this. It’s a unified, self-serve platform that you can get up and running on your own in minutes.

Get going in minutes with one-click integration

Unlike native tools that have you hunting through different admin panels, eesel AI connects to Freshdesk almost instantly. You can set up, configure, and launch your first AI agent all by yourself, often without ever needing to talk to a salesperson or sit through a mandatory demo.

Unify all your knowledge, not just your help center

Maybe the biggest difference is the ability to train your AI on all your company knowledge, no matter where it is. Don’t box your AI into just your Freshdesk articles. With eesel AI, you can easily connect to your knowledge in Confluence, Google Docs, your company website, and even the answers hidden in your past ticket conversations. This gives your AI a much broader and more accurate understanding of your business from day one.

Test with confidence using powerful simulations

How do you know if your AI is ready for prime time? Before you point it at live customers, you want to be sure it’s going to work. eesel AI comes with a simulation mode that lets you test your setup against thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how the AI would have replied, get a real forecast of your automation rate, and spot any gaps in your knowledge base. It lets you roll out your AI knowing exactly what to expect.

This Freshdesk tutorial shows you how to use Freddy AI to enhance your customer experience in 2025.

Final thoughts

So, there you have it. Getting Freddy AI running in Freshdesk is definitely doable, but it’s not a quick flip of a switch. You’re looking at a multi-part setup across the Agent, Copilot, and Insights modules, and its success really hinges on how clean and complete your Freshdesk knowledge base is.

For teams that want a faster, more flexible approach, eesel AI offers a great alternative that plays nicely with all the tools and knowledge sources you already use.

Ready to launch a fully-featured AI agent for Freshdesk in under 15 minutes? Start your eesel AI trial today.