
Let's be real, customer expectations are through the roof. People want answers instantly, and keeping up with 24/7 support can feel like a losing battle. This is where AI is starting to make a real difference. HubSpot’s AI Customer Service Agent, which is part of their "Breeze" AI suite, is a big part of that conversation, mostly because it’s built right into their popular CRM platform.
So, is it the right tool for your team? This guide is here to give you a straightforward look at the HubSpot AI agent. We'll get into what it is, what it does, how you set it up, what it costs, and some important limitations you should be aware of. By the end, you'll have a much clearer idea of whether it’s a good fit for you or if you might be better off with a more flexible solution.
What is the HubSpot AI customer service agent?
The HubSpot Customer Agent is an AI tool that automates customer support chats. It's not a standalone product you can just go out and buy; it’s a feature that comes packaged with the HubSpot Service Hub.
Basically, the agent works by reading your company's existing content, like knowledge base articles, website pages, and blog posts, to answer customer questions as they come in. You can use it in places like your live chat and email to handle the first wave of common questions.
The AI behind all this is called "Breeze," which is HubSpot's own AI engine. Since it’s part of the HubSpot ecosystem, it’s made to work closely with the HubSpot Smart CRM. This means it can see customer data, which helps it have more personal chats. It’s really designed for businesses that are either already running everything on HubSpot or are ready to move their entire marketing, sales, and service departments over to the platform.
A little inside baseball: within HubSpot, you'll often just see this tool called "Customer Agent," and you manage it from a central dashboard called "Breeze Studio."
A user building one of the Breeze Custom Assistants in HubSpot's point-and-click Breeze Studio, which is the central dashboard for the HubSpot AI customer service agent.
HubSpot AI customer service agent: Key features and capabilities
The biggest selling point for the HubSpot AI agent is how tightly it's connected to the rest of the HubSpot platform. If your team lives in HubSpot all day, this setup can create a really smooth, unified support system.
Deep integration with HubSpot's smart CRM
Because the agent and your customer data are in the same system, it can pull in details like contact information, past support tickets, and even where a customer is in the sales process. This lets it have surprisingly personal conversations. For example, it might greet a returning customer by name or reference a product they just bought. All this context is also super helpful if a chat needs to be passed to a human, since the support rep gets the customer's full history without having to go searching for it.
An example of an AI-generated summary provided by the HubSpot AI customer service agent, detailing recent sales activities.
Omnichannel support across your help desk
You can put the HubSpot Customer Agent to work on the channels your customers are actually using. That includes live chat on your website, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and email. Having this kind of omnichannel presence means customers get a consistent experience, whether they're messaging you on the go or sending a formal email.
The conversations inbox for the HubSpot AI customer service agent, showing omnichannel support capabilities.
Training from your existing HubSpot content
The agent learns from the stuff you've already created inside HubSpot. This means your knowledge base articles, website pages, and blogs all become training material. You can also give it public website links or upload documents like PDFs for it to study.
This does bring up a pretty big catch, though. The agent’s knowledge is stuck with these official, polished documents. That’s fine for answering straightforward questions, but it often misses the unwritten rules and clever workarounds that are buried in thousands of past conversations between your support team and customers.
Customizable handoff and routing
You don't just switch on the AI and hope it works out. HubSpot lets you set up specific rules for when a conversation needs to go to a human. You can decide the exact conditions for escalating a chat. From there, you can send the ticket to specific people or teams based on their expertise or the ticket details, which helps make sure tricky problems get to the right person fast.
Setting up the HubSpot AI customer service agent
If your team is already all-in on HubSpot, the setup process is pretty logical. It's designed so you don't need a developer, but you do need to be comfortable clicking around different areas of the HubSpot portal.
The setup workflow in HubSpot
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Create the Agent: First, you’ll navigate to Service > Customer Agent in your HubSpot account. You'll give your agent a name and pick a personality, like "Friendly" or "Professional," to make sure it matches your brand's voice.
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Add Content Sources: Next, you tell the agent where to get its information. You can connect your HubSpot Knowledge Base, specific web pages, and blogs in just a few clicks. You can also add external links or upload files here.
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Deploy to a Channel: Once the agent has its study materials, you have to put it to work in a support channel. This usually means connecting it to a live chat on your website. You'll need to have that channel set up in your conversations inbox or help desk already.
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Configure Handoff Rules: This is where you decide when the AI needs to tag in a human. You'll define what happens when it gets stumped, choosing whether to send the conversation to a specific person, a team, or just into the general queue.
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Test and Publish: Before you let it talk to real customers, HubSpot gives you a testing tool. You can ask it some practice questions to see how it responds and make sure it’s ready. Once you're happy, you can set it live.
A screenshot demonstrating how to set up the brand voice feature for the HubSpot AI customer service agent by pasting in a text sample.
The challenge: What if you're not on HubSpot?
Here's the rub: this whole process only works if your entire support operation is running on the HubSpot Service Hub. For the many teams using dedicated help desks like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom, using HubSpot’s AI agent would require a massive, expensive, and disruptive platform migration.
This is where a solution like eesel AI comes in as a more practical option. eesel AI is designed to plug right into the tools you already use. With one-click connections to dozens of popular help desks, you can add a powerful AI layer to your existing setup without having to tear everything down and start over. You can get an AI agent up and running in minutes, not months.
HubSpot AI customer service agent: Pricing
It's really important to know that you can't just buy the HubSpot Customer Agent by itself. It’s bundled into the more expensive tiers of the HubSpot Service Hub, which comes with pricing based on how many users you have and mandatory onboarding fees that can add up fast.
Here’s a look at what you can expect to pay:
| Feature | Service Hub Professional | Service Hub Enterprise |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | Starts at $100/month per seat | Starts at $150/month per seat |
| Annual Commitment | Discount available for annual payment | Discount available for annual payment |
| Required Onboarding | $1,500 (one-time fee) | $3,500 (one-time fee) |
| Customer Agent | Included | Included |
| AI Usage | Runs on HubSpot Credits. Each conversation costs 100 credits. Plan includes 3,000 credits. | Runs on HubSpot Credits. Each conversation costs 100 credits. Plan includes 5,000 credits. |
| Key Features | Help Desk, Customer Portal, Knowledge Base | Everything in Pro + Skill-based Routing, Conditional SLAs, Customer Journey Analytics |
Analysis of costs
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Per-Seat Model: The cost grows with your team. A support team of 10 agents on the Professional plan would start at $1,000 per month, and that’s after paying the $1,500 onboarding fee.
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HubSpot Credits: Even though the agent is "included," using it isn't free. Every AI conversation uses up your monthly credits. If you have a high volume of support requests, you could easily burn through your allowance and have to buy more, making your monthly bill unpredictable.
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Ecosystem Cost: This pricing is just for the Service Hub. To really get the value from the CRM integration, most businesses also need the Marketing and Sales Hubs, which can add thousands more to your annual bill.
This pricing can feel a bit complicated and hard to predict. By comparison, eesel AI's pricing is designed to be transparent. You get clear tiers based on the number of interactions, with no surprise fees per resolution and the option of month-to-month plans. This gives you a predictable bill that doesn't punish you for being successful.
HubSpot AI customer service agent: Limitations and key considerations
While HubSpot's agent is a decent tool for those fully committed to its ecosystem, there are a few key drawbacks that might make it the wrong choice for teams that need more flexibility and intelligence.
Training primarily on explicit knowledge
As we mentioned earlier, the HubSpot agent learns from your official documents, your knowledge base, website, and PDFs. This is what you'd call "explicit knowledge." It knows the instruction manual. But what about "tacit knowledge"? That’s all the real-world wisdom, brand voice, and clever solutions hidden in the history of your past conversations with customers. It's the stuff your best agents just know.
This is where eesel AI has a huge edge. It's built to train on your historical support tickets from the very beginning. It reads through thousands of past chats to automatically learn your brand's unique tone, figure out what problems customers actually have, and give answers that feel right, all without you having to write a single new help article.
The "all or nothing" automation approach
Turning on a general-purpose AI agent can feel like a big leap. You might be okay with it handling simple password resets, but you probably don't want it trying to solve a complex billing issue on its first day.
eesel AI gives you selective automation and customizable workflows. This means you get to decide exactly which types of tickets the AI is allowed to touch. You can start small by automating just one simple ticket type and have the AI pass everything else to a human. This control lets you build trust in the system and roll out automation at a pace that works for your team.
Lack of robust, risk-free testing
HubSpot gives you a basic preview tool where you can test one question at a time. It’s better than nothing, but it doesn't really show you how the agent will hold up under the pressure of real customer questions in all their messy variety.
This is another spot where eesel AI is different. Its powerful simulation mode lets you test your AI setup on thousands of your actual past tickets in a safe environment. It’s like a full dress rehearsal. It shows you what your automation rate would have been and exactly how the AI would have answered each ticket, taking all the guesswork out of the process before it ever talks to a real customer.
A powerful tool, but only for the right team
The HubSpot AI customer service agent is a capable tool for businesses that are already running their whole operation on the HubSpot platform. That direct connection to the Smart CRM is a genuine advantage for creating personalized customer chats.
But its value is completely tied to being locked into that ecosystem. The complicated pricing, the reliance on formal documents for training, and the limited testing options make it a tough sell for many teams. If you need flexibility, want to stick with your current help desk, and prefer predictable costs, HubSpot's agent probably isn't for you.
At the end of the day, the best AI solution is one that fits into your workflow, not one that makes you change your whole workflow to fit it.
This video provides a great overview of how the HubSpot Breeze Customer Agent can transform your support experience, from setup to achieving a high resolution rate.
A better way to automate support with eesel AI
For teams on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, Gorgias, and other platforms, there’s a much simpler way to bring AI into your support process. eesel AI is built to work with your existing tools, not replace them.
You can go live in minutes with an AI agent that learns directly from your past conversations, gives you full control over what gets automated, and lets you test its performance with total confidence.
Frequently asked questions
The HubSpot AI customer service agent is an AI tool integrated within the HubSpot Service Hub designed to automate customer support chats. Its primary function is to handle initial customer queries across channels like live chat and email by referencing your company's existing content.
The HubSpot AI customer service agent learns by consuming your company's existing "explicit knowledge," such as knowledge base articles, website pages, blog posts, and uploaded documents like PDFs. This content serves as its primary source of information for generating accurate responses.
The HubSpot AI customer service agent is included in the Professional or Enterprise tiers of HubSpot Service Hub, starting at $100-$150+ per month per seat, along with mandatory one-time onboarding fees of $1,500-$3,500. Additionally, its usage consumes HubSpot Credits, which can lead to extra costs if you exceed your monthly allowance.
No, the HubSpot AI customer service agent is deeply embedded within the HubSpot ecosystem. It requires your entire support operation to be running on the HubSpot Service Hub and cannot be used independently or integrated with third-party help desks like Zendesk or Freshdesk.
When the HubSpot AI customer service agent is unable to answer a question or if the query meets specific predefined conditions, it can be configured to hand off the conversation to a human agent. You can set rules to route these escalated tickets to specific teams or individuals based on their expertise.
A significant limitation of the HubSpot AI customer service agent is its reliance on formal, "explicit knowledge" from documents like knowledge base articles, which means it often misses "tacit knowledge." This tacit knowledge includes the practical wisdom and nuanced solutions found in the history of past customer conversations.








