How to use Intercom Fin to summarize a conversation for email wrap up: A complete guide

Struggling to wrap up support emails without spending ages summarizing long conversations? This guide digs into how you can use Intercom Fin for that, what its real-world limitations are, and why a more flexible AI tool might be a better fit for your team.

We’ve all been there. You’ve just finished a long, winding support conversation, and now comes the fun part: boiling it all down into a neat little summary for a follow-up email or an escalation note. It’s the kind of task that feels like it takes forever and pulls your best agents away from actually helping customers.

Intercom Fin is one of the big names in AI built to solve this exact problem, promising to automatically generate summaries right inside your Intercom inbox. It sounds great in theory, but how does it actually perform when you need to craft that perfect email wrap-up?

In this guide, we'll walk you through how to use Intercom Fin for this task. But we’re not stopping there. We’ll also take an honest look at its features, its very real downsides, and its notoriously complex pricing. By the end, you’ll know if Fin is the right tool for the job, or if you need something with a bit more horsepower.

What is Intercom Fin?

Intercom Fin is Intercom's own AI agent, built to live and work inside its customer service platform. Its main purpose is to automate support tasks, whether that’s answering simple questions by digging through your help center or helping your human agents get through their inbox faster.

A visual of the Intercom Fin logo, introducing the tool used to summarize a conversation for email wrap up.

It really works in two different ways:

1. The Fin AI Agent: This is the chatbot your customers talk to. It can handle basic support conversations all on its own.

2. Agent-Assist Tools: These are the features baked into the Intercom Inbox to give your human team a hand. This is where you’ll find tools like AI Summarize, AI Compose, and Copilot, which are what we’ll focus on for email wrap-ups.

Because it’s built right in, it’s an obvious choice for teams already using Intercom. But as you'll see, that convenience comes with some pretty big strings attached.

How to use Intercom Fin for email wrap-ups

If you're committed to using Intercom's native tools, you’ll be stringing together a few of Fin's agent-assist features to create your email wrap-up.

Getting a quick summary with AI Summarize

The most direct tool for the job is "AI Summarize." During or after a conversation, an agent can click a button to have Fin spit out a summary of the entire interaction. This summary gets dropped into the conversation timeline as an internal note.

It's a decent way to get a quick overview without having to read through a novel-length chat history, especially when you’re handing a ticket off to a teammate or just trying to remember what was decided. The goal is to give the agent the gist of the conversation in a few seconds.

Turning the summary into an email

Of course, that AI-generated summary isn't a ready-to-send email. It’s more like a rough draft. From there, an agent can use Fin's "AI Compose" features to polish it into something you’d actually send to a customer.

This tool helps you:

• Rephrase the text to match your brand's voice.

• Switch up the tone to be more formal or a little friendlier.

• Expand on the summary to add more detail where needed.

• Fix any spelling and grammar mistakes.

If the conversation needs to be logged as a formal ticket, the "AI Autofill" feature can also lend a hand by suggesting a ticket title and description, saving a few more clicks.

Putting summaries on autopilot with Workflows

Clicking that summary button for every single conversation is going to get old fast. That's where Intercom Workflows come in. You can set up an automation that tells Fin to create a summary automatically when something specific happens.

For anyone who’s used Intercom’s automation builder before, the setup is pretty simple:

1. Start by creating a new workflow.

2. Choose a trigger, like "When a conversation is closed" or "When a ticket is assigned to another team."

3. Add an action step and choose "Add summary note."

Once it’s live, this workflow makes sure a summary is automatically added whenever your trigger condition is met. It keeps the process consistent, but you're still at the mercy of Fin's logic for the summary content itself, with no real way to steer it.

The limitations of using Intercom Fin for email wrap-ups

While Fin is convenient, it comes with some serious drawbacks that can be a real headache for teams who need more control and accuracy.

You can't customize summaries

Fin's summaries are basically a black box. You push the button, and the AI gives you whatever it deems important. There's no way to give it a template, define the format, or tell it which pieces of information are non-negotiable for your email wrap-ups.

Does your escalation process require every summary to include the customer's account ID, the product they mentioned, and the exact troubleshooting steps you took? Too bad. With Fin, you can't enforce that. The output is completely controlled by Intercom's models, which often don't align with what your team actually needs to get work done. For anyone relying on structured, consistent summaries, this is a dealbreaker.

Its knowledge is stuck inside Intercom

Fin can only learn from information that lives inside Intercom, like your Help Center articles and past conversations.

But what if the key piece of context for a support issue is buried in a Confluence page, a shared Google Doc, or your internal engineering wiki? Fin has no clue any of that exists. This means your agents still have to manually hunt down that info and copy-paste it into their wrap-up email, which completely defeats the purpose of having an AI assistant in the first place. You end up with half-baked summaries that don't have the details needed to be useful.

The output is inconsistent and hard to fix

Intercom’s own documentation admits that asking Fin the same question twice can get you different answers. That randomness applies to its summaries, too. One summary might be perfectly on point, and the next might be a rambling mess that misses the entire point of the conversation.

And good luck trying to train it. You can't just tell Fin, "That summary was terrible, do it this way next time." The official advice is to tweak your help center articles and hope the algorithm eventually gets the hint. There’s no direct feedback loop, which leaves you with an unreliable tool that’s nearly impossible to improve.

Intercom Fin pricing explained

Let's talk about the price tag, because Intercom's pricing is another beast entirely. It’s layered, confusing, and can get expensive fast, especially if you rely on the AI features.

You’re not paying one flat fee. The cost is a mix of seat licenses, add-ons, and usage-based charges. The AI tools that generate summaries, like Copilot, are usually sold as add-ons to the main plans.

One of the biggest pain points is the per-resolution pricing for the customer-facing Fin AI Agent. You’re charged $0.99 for every single conversation the AI resolves. While this doesn’t directly apply to the agent-assist summaries, it shows a pricing philosophy that can lead to some nasty surprises on your bill. A busy month could cost you way more than you planned for, making it a nightmare to budget.

Here’s a rough idea of what you might be paying:

Cost Component	Description	Price
Base Plan (Required)	Access to the Intercom platform and inbox.	Starts at $29/seat/mo (Essential Plan)
Fin AI Agent	For customer-facing automated resolutions.	$0.99 per resolution
Copilot Add-on	Unlocks unlimited use of agent-assist AI tools.	$29 per agent/mo (billed annually)
Overall Cost	Variable and unpredictable	Depends on your plan, seat count, and how many resolutions Fin handles.

The bottom line is that you're not just buying a tool; you're signing up for a complicated pricing model where your costs can easily get out of hand.

A more flexible alternative to Intercom Fin

If you're tired of being locked into a closed system with no control and unpredictable bills, you're not alone. Many teams eventually realize they need a more powerful and open solution.

This is where a tool like eesel AI comes into the picture. It's an AI platform built to connect directly to the helpdesk you already use, including Intercom, so you don't have to change your entire workflow. It’s designed to solve the exact problems that make Fin so frustrating.

• Connect all your knowledge: eesel AI doesn’t live in a silo. You can connect it to all the places your team stores information, not just your helpdesk. Pull context from Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and past ticket history to create summaries that are actually complete.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to various knowledge sources, a key advantage when you need to do more than use Intercom Fin to summarize a conversation for email wrap up.

• Get full control with a prompt editor: Unlike Fin's "take it or leave it" approach, eesel AI puts you in the driver's seat with a powerful prompt editor. You can define the exact tone, format, and structure for your AI-generated summaries. You can build your own templates and tell the AI precisely what to include in every wrap-up.

A screenshot of the eesel AI prompt editor, which offers more control than using Intercom Fin to summarize a conversation for email wrap up.

• Test before you go live: Nervous about letting an AI run loose? eesel AI has a simulation mode that lets you test your summary automation on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how it will behave before you roll it out to your team.

The simulation mode in eesel AI, which allows testing before you use it, unlike with Intercom Fin to summarize a conversation for email wrap up.

• Enjoy transparent, predictable pricing: eesel AI’s pricing is simple. Plans are based on a set number of monthly AI interactions, with no per-resolution fees. Your bill won't suddenly jump after a busy month, giving you the kind of budget stability every support manager needs.

A view of eesel AI's transparent pricing page, a clear alternative to the complex costs of using Intercom Fin to summarize a conversation for email wrap up.

The verdict on Intercom Fin for email wrap-ups

Intercom Fin offers a quick, out-of-the-box way for teams to start generating conversation summaries. It’s convenient, and it can definitely save you a bit of time on simple tasks.

But that convenience comes at a price: you get zero customization, your knowledge is stuck inside Intercom, and the pricing model can be a real headache. For any team that needs reliable, accurate, and consistent email wrap-ups that pull from all their company knowledge, Fin's cracks start to show pretty quickly.

If you want real control over your AI, the power to connect all your knowledge sources, and a price that won’t give you a heart attack, it’s worth looking at a more powerful platform that works with your helpdesk, not against it.

Ready to stop fighting with your tools and create perfect email wrap-ups every time? See how eesel AI works with your helpdesk to give your team the flexibility it needs.