What is Intercom AI? A guide to its AI services

Intercom has been a major player in customer service for a long time, and like most tech companies, they’ve jumped headfirst into artificial intelligence. The big promise is to automate support tickets and help human agents work faster. But what does Intercom AI actually do day-to-day?

Here, we’ll give you a straight-up look at Intercom’s AI tools, mainly their Fin AI Agent and Copilot. We’ll break down what they are, how they work, what they’re good at, and just as important where they fall short. This guide is for anyone trying to figure out if Intercom’s AI is the right fit, especially if you’re not keen on switching your entire tech stack for it.

What is Intercom AI?

First off, Intercom AI isn’t one single thing you can buy. It’s a set of AI features built directly into the Intercom customer service platform. The idea is to let automation handle the simple stuff, freeing up your human agents to tackle the trickier problems.

The two main parts you’ll hear about are:

• Fin AI Agent: This is the main chatbot that talks to your customers. It’s built to understand questions and solve problems on its own, so a human doesn’t have to.
• Copilot: This is an AI assistant that lives inside the Intercom Inbox. It helps your agents by drafting replies, summarizing chats, and pulling up information quickly.

But here’s the catch: these AI tools are designed to work inside Intercom’s world, which includes their own Helpdesk, Ticketing, and Omnichannel products.

An all-in-one system sounds nice, but it brings up a big question: what if your team already has a setup you like with a helpdesk like Zendesk or Freshdesk? Let’s get into that.

A closer look at the Intercom AI features

To get a real feel for Intercom AI, let’s break down its main tools and see what they bring to the table.

Fin AI Agent: The front-line Intercom AI chatbot

Fin is Intercom’s star AI agent, meant to be the first one to greet your customers. It fields questions from chat, email, and social media.

According to Intercom, here’s what it can do:

• Learning and training: You can feed Fin knowledge from your public Help Center articles, PDFs, and other public web pages. It also works in over 45 languages, which is handy for teams with international customers.
• Taking action: You can set it up to do more than just answer questions, like processing an order cancellation or a subscription refund. Intercom mentions this is under “managed availability,” which usually means it’s not a standard feature for everyone and might need some extra help to get going.
• Tracking performance: It comes with dashboards to watch metrics like how many issues it solves on its own. It also has a “CX Score” to grade how good each AI chat was.

Fin is smart, but it mainly learns from official documents. That’s a good start, but it can miss the real-world wisdom hidden in your team’s past conversations. The best answers are often buried in old support tickets and agent notes, not just in a formal help article.

An alternative like the AI Agent from eesel AI takes a different route. It’s built to learn from a wider range of information, including messy, unstructured stuff like old tickets and your team’s saved replies. This means it picks up on the tone and specific tricks your best agents use to solve problems. Better yet, eesel.ai is designed to be flexible. It connects right into the helpdesk you already have (yes, even Intercom) and pulls knowledge from wherever it is, like Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion. You get a smarter AI without having to move house.

Intercom AI Copilot: An AI sidekick for your agents

Copilot is the second piece of the puzzle. It’s an assistant that sits right inside the Intercom Inbox to help your human agents work smarter, not harder.

It helps by:

• Drafting replies for agents instantly, using the chat history and your help articles for context.
• Summarizing long conversations so agents can catch up in a flash.
• Helping with training and troubleshooting by pulling up internal guides when needed.

The biggest catch with Copilot is simple but it’s a big one: it only works in the Intercom Inbox. If your team uses Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Jira Service Management, you can’t use it. You have to switch to Intercom’s helpdesk to get this feature.

This is a classic case of “ecosystem lock-in,” where you have to buy into the whole system to get the one piece you want. By contrast, eesel AI’s Copilot is built to work anywhere. It gives you the same perks like AI-drafted replies that learn from your team’s best work but it does it inside the helpdesk your team already uses. You get more efficient agents without the headache and expense of moving to a new inbox.

The Fin AI Engine™: How Intercom AI works

The Fin AI Engine™ is the tech that makes Fin tick. Intercom talks a lot about how it’s built for accuracy, speed, and safety.

In simple terms, here’s how it figures out an answer:

1. It clarifies the question: First, it looks at what the customer asked, checks for anything weird (like someone asking for private info), and rewords the question so the AI can understand it better.
2. It finds the right info: It then searches through your approved knowledge sources (like your help center) to find the right facts. This step makes sure the AI doesn’t just make stuff up.
3. It double-checks the answer: Before sending a reply, it does one last check to make sure the answer is correct and actually answers the customer’s question.

The Fin AI Engine is obviously clever, but for the person using it, it can feel like a bit of a mystery box. You put your knowledge in, a customer asks a question, and an answer comes out. But you don’t have much say over how it reasons or what tone it uses beyond some basic settings.

With eesel.ai, you get more control. You can set the bot’s personality, behavior, and rules for when to pass a chat to a human, all by writing simple instructions like you’re training a new team member. Even better, eesel AI has a simulation mode. This lets you test the AI on thousands of your past support tickets before it ever talks to a real customer. This way, you get a solid prediction of how well it will perform and how much it could save you, taking the gamble out of launching your AI agent.

The biggest Intercom AI drawback: The all-or-nothing ecosystem

Intercom’s AI features are pretty cool on their own, but the biggest hurdle for most businesses is that you have to go all-in on the Intercom ecosystem.

Why Intercom AI often means switching platforms

To get the most out of Intercom AI, where Fin, Copilot, and all the reporting tools work together perfectly, you’re pushed to use the entire Intercom Helpdesk. If your company has spent years getting another platform just right, that’s a huge thing to ask.

The pain of this “rip-and-replace” approach is real, and it’s not just about the price tag:

• The cost: You have to pay for a whole new premium platform license.
• The disruption: Migrating all your data and rebuilding your workflows is messy and time-consuming.
• Retraining your team: Everyone has to learn a new system, which usually means productivity takes a hit for a while.
• Losing what works: There’s always a risk of losing data or finding out that a workflow you depend on can’t be recreated in the new system.

The alternative to Intercom AI: An AI layer for the tools you already use

This is exactly the issue eesel.ai was created to fix. Instead of making you ditch the tools you already know, it makes them better. Think of it as adding a new layer, not ripping out the foundation.

eesel AI connects directly to your current helpdesk, your knowledge bases (whether they’re in Confluence or Google Docs), and your chat tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams. It becomes a central AI brain that learns from everything and then powers a chatbot, a copilot for your agents, or an AI Triage tool, all inside the software you use today.

The advantage is pretty obvious: you get results faster, spend less on setup, and don’t interrupt your team’s work. You get top-tier AI without the pain of switching everything over.

Intercom AI vs. a dedicated AI platform

To make the choice clearer, here’s a simple side-by-side look at the two approaches.

Feature comparison

Feature	Intercom AI	eesel AI
How it works	All-in-one suite, works best inside the Intercom Helpdesk.	A flexible AI layer that connects to any helpdesk.
What it’s for	Customer-facing support and agent help within Intercom.	Automated support, agent help, AI triage, and internal answers.
Connects with	Mostly its own products.	Zendesk, Freshdesk, Jira, Slack, Confluence, Shopify, 100+ others.
Learns from	Help Center articles, PDFs, public web pages.	Old tickets, agent notes, Google Docs, Notion, internal wikis.
Testing & control	Basic guidance settings and a live preview.	Simple instructions and simulation on past tickets.
Best for	Teams who are already using or moving to Intercom.	Teams who want to add great AI to their current setup.

Is Intercom AI right for you?

Where does that leave you? Intercom AI is a solid, well-integrated system that makes a lot of sense for teams already using the Intercom platform or those ready to make the switch. Having your helpdesk, chatbot, and agent tools all in one place is definitely convenient.

If you’re looking for that kind of all-in-one package, Intercom is worth a serious look.

But for all the teams out there who want to add powerful AI without the cost and chaos of ditching the tools they already have, a more flexible, plug-and-play platform is probably the smarter move.

If you’re curious about how an AI layer could boost your current helpdesk and bring all your scattered knowledge together, you can start a free trial with eesel AI or book a demo to see how it works with your own data.