Intercom AI Copilot: A Complete Guide for 2025

Let’s be real: being a support agent is tough. You’re constantly jumping between tabs, trying to find that one specific answer buried in a sea of internal documents. All that digging slows you down and can lead to inconsistent answers for customers. AI assistants are popping up to help with this, and Intercom’s version is the Intercom AI Copilot, which works right inside the agent inbox.

But is it the right choice for your team? This guide will give you an honest, detailed look at what Intercom AI Copilot is, what it does well, how its pricing works, and a few key limitations you’ll want to consider before you sign on the dotted line.

What is Intercom AI Copilot?

So, what exactly is it? The Intercom AI Copilot is an AI assistant built to work directly within the Intercom helpdesk. Its whole purpose is to help your support agents answer customer questions faster by generating draft replies from your company’s knowledge. It’s like having a super-fast research assistant sitting next to every agent, helping them be more efficient, write better replies, and get new team members trained up in record time.

It’s good to know that Copilot is mainly a tool to assist your human agents. It’s not the same as Intercom’s “Fin AI Agent,” which is their fully automated chatbot. Copilot is designed for teams who are already using, or are planning to switch their entire support operation over to, the Intercom Customer Service Suite.

How Intercom AI Copilot actually works

To get a real feel for what the Intercom AI Copilot brings to the table, you need to look at how it actually functions, from learning about your business to helping agents in their day-to-day work.

How Copilot sources information

Copilot’s main trick is its ability to find information wherever your team has stored it. Instead of agents having to search manually, it brings everything together to draft an answer.

• Past conversations: It digs through the last four months of your team’s chats to learn your brand’s voice and find out how you’ve solved similar problems before.

• Help Center articles: It reads both your public-facing articles and any internal-only guides you keep in Intercom’s Knowledge Hub.

• External docs: You can hook it up to third-party knowledge bases like Notion or Confluence. It can even pull info from public websites or PDFs you upload.

• Macros: It also uses your library of pre-written macros, so the answers it suggests already align with your team’s standard replies.

The agent experience

From an agent’s perspective, the tool feels pretty integrated. They can ask Copilot questions in a side panel, highlight a customer’s message to create a query automatically, or use keyboard shortcuts to get things done faster.

The tool also points them to relevant macros and lets them edit any AI-generated response before it goes out. Agents can change the tone to be friendlier or more formal, or even translate the text into a different language. One helpful feature is the source verification, which shows agents exactly where the information came from. This helps them feel more confident in the answers they’re providing.

This video provides a demonstration of Intercom's Fin AI Copilot, showcasing how the AI assistant for support agents works in practice.

How managers track performance

Intercom also gives managers an analytics dashboard to see how the team is using Copilot. You can track adoption rates, see how many conversations involve the AI, and check the quality of its suggestions. The goal is to give you the data you need to spot and fill gaps in your knowledge base and make sure your team is using the tool effectively.

Potential downsides to consider

While the features sound good, there are some real-world limitations that any support leader should think about before making a commitment.

Complicated pricing model

Intercom’s pricing isn’t always straightforward. You’ll pay a base fee for each agent seat, but then you could also get hit with usage-based charges. Their automated agent, Fin, costs $0.99 for every resolution it handles. Copilot access is either capped at a measly 10 conversations per month or requires a separate flat-rate add-on for each agent.

This kind of pricing can make budgeting a nightmare. Your bill can change month to month, and if your AI has a great month and resolves a lot of tickets, your costs actually go up. It feels a bit like being penalized for success. This is a big reason why many teams prefer tools like eesel AI, which sticks to a simple, flat monthly fee. You know exactly what you’re paying, no matter how much your team uses it.

A screenshot of eesel AI's pricing page, showing a clear, flat-rate structure as a contrast to the Intercom AI Copilot model.

Vendor lock-in with Intercom

Intercom AI Copilot is built for one place and one place only: the Intercom Inbox. To use it, your entire support operation has to live there. This is a classic case of vendor lock-in. If your team is happily using a different helpdesk like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Jira Service Management, you’d have to go through a huge, expensive migration just to get access to Copilot.

This is where a tool like eesel AI is completely different. It’s built to work with the tools you already use. You just plug it into your existing helpdesk, and you’re good to go in a few minutes. You get powerful copilot and automation features without having to ditch the workflows your team knows and loves.

A screenshot displaying the various helpdesks and knowledge bases that eesel AI integrates with, highlighting its flexibility compared to the Intercom AI Copilot.

Lack of a pre-launch testing environment

You wouldn’t buy a car without a test drive, right? Testing an AI before it starts talking to your customers is just as important. Intercom’s method is more of a ‘flick the switch and see what happens’ approach, which can be pretty nerve-wracking. How do you really know how it will perform on thousands of real customer questions before it’s live?

This is another spot where a platform like eesel AI offers some peace of mind. It has a simulation mode that lets you test the AI on thousands of your past tickets in a safe environment. You get real data on its performance and potential savings, so you can make tweaks and launch it feeling confident.

A screenshot of eesel AI's simulation mode, which allows testing the AI on past tickets before deployment, a feature not available with the Intercom AI Copilot.

Breaking down Intercom AI Copilot pricing

Getting a handle on the total cost of Intercom AI Copilot can be tricky because there are a few different pieces to the puzzle. Your final bill is a mix of your base subscription (how many agent seats you pay for) and then either usage fees or add-ons.

Here’s a quick look at the plans where you can get Copilot:

Plan	Base Price (per seat/mo, billed annually)	Key Features Included	Copilot Usage
Essential	$29	Fin AI Agent, Shared Inbox, Help Center	10 free Copilot conversations per agent/mo
Advanced	$85	All of Essential + Workflows, Multiple Inboxes	10 free Copilot conversations per agent/mo
Expert	$132	All of Advanced + SLAs, Multibrand	10 free Copilot conversations per agent/mo

For most teams, 10 free conversations a month just isn’t going to cut it. To get unlimited usage, you’ll need the Copilot add-on, which is an extra $29 per agent, per month (if you pay annually).

Let’s run some quick numbers. Imagine you have a 10-person support team on the "Advanced" plan. The math would look like this: ($85 per seat x 10 agents) + ($29 Copilot add-on x 10 agents) = $1,140 per month. And remember, this doesn’t even include the separate per-resolution fees for their fully autonomous bot, Fin.

In contrast, eesel AI’s pricing is built to be predictable. Plans come with a large bucket of monthly AI interactions that covers both copilot suggestions and automated resolutions, all for one flat fee. For instance, eesel’s Business plan gives you 3,000 AI interactions every month for a set price, with no surprise add-on fees for core features.

Is Intercom AI Copilot the right fit for your team?

At the end of the day, Intercom AI Copilot is a solid tool, but it really only makes sense for teams that are already living and breathing inside the Intercom platform and don’t mind a complex pricing structure.

The big hurdles are the unpredictable costs, the fact that you’re locked into their system, and the inability to test it out properly before you commit.

If your team values flexibility, wants a budget that doesn’t have surprises, and loves the helpdesk you’re already using, it’s probably worth looking at other options. See how a platform like eesel AI can bring powerful AI features to your current setup, with a simple process that gets you up and running in minutes, not months.