Our honest Intercom AI review (2025): Features, Pricing & a Better Alternative

If you work in customer support, you’ve definitely heard of Intercom. They’re a huge name in the game. Their AI offering, particularly the Fin AI Agent, gets a lot of buzz for its promise to automate support, resolve issues faster, and keep customers happy. It sounds great on the surface.

But here’s the real question that probably brought you here: with its all-in-one approach and a pretty unique pricing model, is it actually the right move for your team? It's a big commitment.

In this Intercom AI review, we’re going to pull back the curtain. We’ll get into what its core features really do, what it’s like to set up, and how the pricing works (spoiler: it’s complicated). We'll look at where Intercom AI really delivers and, just as importantly, where its limitations could cause some serious headaches for your team. We’ll also talk about a more flexible alternative that plays nicely with the tools you already use, offers costs you can actually predict, and gets you up and running in minutes.

What is Intercom AI?

So, what exactly is Intercom AI? It’s not just one single product. Think of it more like a toolkit of AI features that are built directly into the main Intercom customer service platform. It’s powered by some seriously advanced large language models, like OpenAI's GPT-4, and has been trained specifically for the world of customer support conversations.

It’s made up of a few key parts that work together:

• Fin AI Agent: This is the main event, the customer-facing chatbot. Its job is to greet customers and answer their questions by digging through your knowledge base.

• Copilot: This is the AI assistant that works side-by-side with your human agents inside their inbox. It helps them write replies, adjust their tone, and get the gist of long conversations quickly.

• Workflows: This is an automation builder that lets you set up rules for all sorts of things, like sending a conversation to the right department or collecting info from a customer, all without a human needing to step in.

The whole idea behind Intercom AI is to give you a single, AI-first solution for support. But it’s designed for businesses that are either already using Intercom for everything or are willing to move their entire operation over to it.

Key features: A closer look

Let's dig into what Intercom AI can actually do, looking at both the good and the parts that might not be a great fit for every team.

The Fin AI agent

Fin is built to be the first point of contact for your customers. It jumps in and automatically answers questions by finding and pulling together information from your Intercom Articles (that’s what they call their help center). If your team is all-in on the Intercom ecosystem, this works beautifully. Fin has full access to everything in your Intercom knowledge base and can spit out answers in a snap.

But here’s the catch: Fin's world is pretty much limited to the content inside Intercom Articles. What about all the other places your team’s knowledge lives? For most companies, crucial information is scattered everywhere. You might have troubleshooting guides in Confluence, project specs in Google Docs, or even just unspoken knowledge buried in past support tickets. Fin can’t see any of that. It’s like trying to find a book in a library when you’re only allowed to look in one aisle.

This is where a more modern approach can make a huge difference. A tool like eesel AI is designed to unify knowledge from all your different sources. It learns from your past support tickets to pick up on your company’s unique voice and connects to the tools your team already relies on every day. By seeing the complete picture, the AI can give answers that are far more accurate and helpful.

This image shows how eesel AI can connect to various knowledge sources, a key point made in this Intercom AI review.

Copilot for agent assistance

Copilot is the AI assistant that hangs out in the agent inbox, and it’s genuinely useful. It can draft replies based on your knowledge base, help an agent rephrase something to sound more empathetic, or summarize a long, complicated chat history into a few bullet points. It's a fantastic way to get new team members up to speed and help your seasoned agents work faster.

The downside? It costs extra. Copilot typically runs you an additional $29 to $35 per agent, every month. That’s on top of what you’re already paying for each agent’s seat on your main plan, and on top of the per-resolution fee we’ll talk about later. It's another line item on a bill that can already be a bit unpredictable.

With eesel AI, the AI Copilot isn’t an expensive add-on; it's just part of the package. It's included in every plan. You get all the powerful reply-drafting and agent-assist features without having to pay a separate fee for every single agent, which makes for much simpler and more affordable billing.

A screenshot showing the eesel AI Copilot drafting a reply in a helpdesk, relevant to the Intercom AI review discussion on agent assistance.

Workflows and automation

Intercom’s workflow builder is powerful, no doubt about it. It’s a no-code, visual tool that lets you map out complex, automated rules for handling conversations. You can create flows that automatically route tickets about billing to the finance team, tag conversations that mention a specific feature, or ask customers a series of questions to gather context before passing them to a human.

The big "but" here is that these powerful workflows are locked inside the Intercom platform. If your team currently uses another helpdesk like Zendesk or Freshdesk, you can't touch this tool. The only way to use it is to migrate your entire support operation over to Intercom. And let's be honest, that kind of migration is a massive, disruptive project that no one looks forward to.

This is why eesel AI was built to enhance your current setup, not force you to replace it. It’s designed to slot right into the helpdesk you’re already using. You get to add powerful AI and automation to your existing workflows without the pain of a full platform migration.

The setup and integration experience

Switching to a new AI tool can be a major project. Let’s compare how Intercom handles this versus a more modern, flexible tool.

Getting started: The onboarding process

The onboarding for Intercom AI is completely woven into its platform. To really get the most out of it, you have to commit to using Intercom as your one and only helpdesk.

If your team is currently on Zendesk, Freshdesk, or something else, this means you’re looking at what’s often called a "rip and replace" scenario. You’re not just adding a new tool; you’re tearing out your old system and starting from scratch. This involves moving all of your historical ticket data, rebuilding your entire knowledge base inside Intercom Articles, and retraining every single person on your support team on a brand-new interface. It’s a project that can easily take weeks, if not months, and can cause a lot of disruption to your daily operations.

A more flexible alternative: Integrating without migrating

There’s a much simpler way to do this. eesel AI was built from the ground up to work with the tools you already know and love.

This image displays the simple, self-serve implementation workflow of eesel AI, a key point in this Intercom AI review.

With one-click integrations for major helpdesks like Zendesk and Freshdesk, you can add powerful AI automation to your existing setup in a matter of minutes. There’s no migration to worry about. You just connect your accounts, and it starts learning.

What’s more, eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your tools, configure your AI agent, and have it running without ever having to get on a call with a salesperson. Many enterprise-level tools require you to go through lengthy sales cycles and demos just to get started. With eesel AI, you can just get it done.

A complete pricing breakdown

Pricing is one of the most important parts of any Intercom AI review, and Intercom’s model is one you really need to understand before you commit. It can lead to some surprisingly high and unpredictable bills.

Intercom's pricing plans

Intercom has three main plans, and they all have a monthly fee for each "seat" or agent on your team (when you pay annually):

• Essential: $29 per seat/month

• Advanced: $85 per seat/month

• Expert: $132 per seat/month

But here is the crucial part: on top of those seat prices, they charge a $0.99 fee for every single resolution that Fin, the AI agent, handles. A "resolution" is any time the AI successfully answers a question without needing to escalate it to a human. This fee applies to all plans. If you want to use just the Fin agent with another helpdesk, there’s a standalone plan, but it has a minimum of 50 resolutions per month.

The hidden costs of per-resolution pricing

This per-resolution model creates a really tricky situation: your costs go up the better the AI performs.

Is the $1 per resolution with Intercom AI worth it? We have a pretty large support volume and our initial estimates put our monthly cost at an additional $4,000 to $5,000. It feels like we're being punished for having an effective AI. Are we missing something or is this as crazy as it sounds?

Reddit

Let’s imagine you have a great month. Your AI is working perfectly and deflects 2,000 tickets that would have otherwise gone to your team. That's a huge win for your team's efficiency! But because of the pricing model, your Intercom bill just jumped by almost $2,000. It can feel like you’re being penalized for successfully automating your support. This makes it incredibly difficult to budget accurately and can create a fear of scaling up your automation.

In contrast, eesel AI offers transparent and predictable pricing. Plans are based on a simple, flat monthly fee for a generous number of AI interactions, with no per-resolution fees. You know exactly what your bill will be at the end of the month, which lets you scale your automation confidently, without worrying about a surprise invoice. eesel AI also offers flexible month-to-month plans you can cancel anytime.

This image shows eesel AI's predictable pricing model, a key topic in this Intercom AI review.

The final verdict: Is Intercom AI worth it?

So, where does that leave us? Let's be clear: Intercom AI is a powerful and well-put-together suite of tools. If your company is already deeply invested in the Intercom platform and you have a budget that can handle a variable, consumption-based cost model, it could be a fantastic choice.

However, for many teams, its biggest limitations are hard to ignore. The platform lock-in, the potential for a painful migration process, and the unpredictable costs make it a tough sell for anyone who values flexibility, control, and a stable budget.

This video offers a balanced Intercom AI review, covering its position as an all-in-one platform with the Fin AI agent at its core.

The bottom line is this: if you're not already an Intercom power user, the cost and hassle of making the switch might be more trouble than it's worth.

A better way to automate support: Try eesel AI

If you’ve been nodding along to the challenges of being locked into one platform and getting hit with surprise bills, there's a different way to approach AI for support. eesel AI is designed for modern teams who want all the power of automation without the headaches.

With eesel AI, you get:

• Painless Integration: It plugs directly into the helpdesk you’re already using. No migration, no drama. You can be up and running in minutes.

• Radical Simplicity: You can go from signing up to having a live AI agent all on your own. No mandatory sales calls needed.

• Predictable Pricing: You pay a flat monthly fee. There are no per-resolution charges, ever. Budgeting just got a whole lot easier.

• Total Control: You can use a powerful simulation mode to test your AI on past tickets before it ever talks to a real customer, so you can roll it out with confidence.

A screenshot of eesel AI's simulation mode, which allows users to test the AI's performance before deployment, a feature highlighted as a key advantage in this Intercom AI review.

Ready to see how easy AI-powered support can actually be? Start your free eesel AI trial or book a demo with our team today.