Your support team is swamped. It feels like half the tickets are the same questions over and over. Since you're already living in Salesforce, grabbing a Salesforce AI chatbot seems like a no-brainer, right? Just plug it in, deflect the easy questions, and give your team some breathing room.
But it's rarely that simple. This guide will walk you through what it's really like to use Salesforce's own AI chatbot, Einstein Bots, the good, the bad, and the expensive. We'll also look at a different approach for teams who need a bot working today, not next quarter.
A native bot might sound easy, but you can quickly get tangled in hidden costs, developer dependencies, and knowledge gaps. Let's dig in.
What is a Salesforce AI chatbot?
A Salesforce AI chatbot is an AI assistant built to have conversations with your customers, right inside the Salesforce environment. The big name in this space is Salesforce Einstein Bots, a native tool built to work smoothly with products like Service Cloud.
Its main job is to handle common questions, collect some basic info from customers, and then hand things over to a human agent when the conversation gets complicated.
The main draw is that it can pull information directly from your Salesforce records, like Cases, Contacts, and Knowledge articles, to answer questions. If your company’s entire universe of information is already neatly stored in Salesforce, it has a pretty solid starting point.
The native option: Exploring Einstein Bots features
To be fair, let's look at what the native Salesforce AI chatbot can actually do. Einstein Bots are powerful, and for the right kind of company, they can be a solid choice.
Core capabilities and integrations
Einstein Bots are built using "dialogs," which are basically conversation maps you design. You lay out different paths with messages, questions, and actions to steer the conversation.
For the trickier stuff where customers don't follow a script, the bots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand what someone means, not just the keywords they type. So if a customer writes, "my order is MIA," the bot gets that they're asking about their order status.
Since it's a Salesforce native, it can talk directly to your records. An Einstein Bot can create a new case or look up a customer's order history without you needing to fuss with complex APIs. You can also deploy it on your website (whether it's an Experience Cloud portal or your main site) and other messaging apps.
The setup and build process
You build an Einstein Bot in the Salesforce setup menu using the Bot Builder. The whole process involves setting up those dialogs we talked about, defining "entities" (which are just data points the bot needs to recognize, like an 'order number' or 'email address'), and teaching its NLP model to understand different "intents."
While it has a visual, drag-and-drop interface, don't let that fool you into thinking it's a walk in the park. As you'll find in plenty of community forums, the setup is deeply tied to the Salesforce ecosystem and you really need to know your way around the platform. It feels like it was built for a certified Salesforce admin, not a support manager who's just trying to cut down the ticket queue.
The challenges of the native chatbot
Okay, this is where things get tricky. For many teams, actually putting a Salesforce AI chatbot into practice comes with surprise costs, technical headaches, and some frustrating roadblocks.
The hidden costs and complex pricing
Getting your hands on Einstein Bots isn't as simple as buying a new app. The feature is often bundled into Salesforce’s priciest plans, like the Service Cloud Unlimited Edition, which costs a whopping $350 per user, per month. If you're on the more common Enterprise Edition, you can tack it on as an add-on, but that's still another $75 per user, per month.
On top of all that, the price is often tied to a "Digital Engagement" license that limits you to a certain number of bot conversations each month. Have a busy week, and you could easily blow past that limit and get hit with surprise overage fees. For a lot of teams, this just isn't a realistic cost for a chatbot.
The steep learning curve and implementation time
Remember those community forums? One person trying to integrate a third-party bot mentioned it would require "Code 100%." Einstein Bots might be "low-code" up to a point, but as soon as you want to do anything custom, you'll likely need Apex code and a Salesforce developer on standby.
Just want to put the bot on your company website? Get ready to generate JavaScript snippets, mess with "Embedded Service Deployments," and fight with security settings like CORS. It's not a one-click setup by any stretch.
All this technical work means a long time to get started. It can take weeks, or even months, to get a bot planned, built, tested, and live. For a support team drowning in tickets now, that's a lifetime.
Limited and siloed knowledge sources
This might be the biggest "gotcha" of all. Einstein Bots are at their best when every single piece of your company's knowledge is stored in Salesforce Knowledge. But let's be real, whose is?
Most companies have important info spread out everywhere: in shared Google Docs, internal wikis on Confluence or Notion, and all that crucial "tribal knowledge" buried in old Slack threads.
Trying to get an Einstein Bot to access anything outside of Salesforce is a massive headache. It usually involves building expensive, custom integrations. The bot ends up with a very narrow view of your company’s actual knowledge, which means it can only answer a handful of questions before giving up and escalating to your team.
A flexible third-party alternative
So, it's pretty clear the native Salesforce AI chatbot is powerful but not for everyone. For teams that need to move fast and don't have a huge budget or a dev team on call, a modern, integration-first tool is often a better bet.
Go live in minutes, not months
Instead of spending weeks wrestling with Salesforce setup, you could get an AI agent live in an afternoon. Some tools, like eesel AI, are built to be self-serve. You can sign up, connect your helpdesk with a click, and launch a bot without talking to a single salesperson.
What's really helpful is having a simulation mode. Instead of just launching your bot and hoping for the best, you can test it on thousands of your past support tickets. This lets you see exactly how it will perform, how many tickets it can resolve, and what your ROI looks like before it ever talks to a real customer. It's about building with confidence.
Unify all your knowledge, instantly
Remember that problem with knowledge being scattered everywhere? This is where a third-party tool can make a huge difference. eesel AI was designed to connect to all the places your team's knowledge already exists. With over 100 integrations, you can instantly give your bot a complete brain.
Just connect it to your public help center, your internal Confluence wiki, and those important process docs living in Google Docs. It can even train on your past support tickets to learn your brand's unique voice and solutions from day one. This gives your bot a much fuller picture, which means fewer escalations and more genuinely helpful answers for your customers.
Take full control with a customizable workflow engine
Modern AI platforms also give you a lot more control, but in a way that's actually easy to manage. With something like eesel AI’s AI Agent, you get to decide exactly what kinds of tickets the AI handles and what actions it can take.
For instance, you could set up your bot to look up an order status in Shopify, update a ticket field in your helpdesk, and then send the ticket to a specific team based on what the customer asked. You can set all of this up through a simple interface, no Apex code needed. It’s a level of control that's just not practical for most teams using the native Salesforce tools.
Pricing comparison: Einstein Bots vs. eesel AI
Let's talk money, because the pricing models for these two options are worlds apart. Here's how it breaks down.
Official Salesforce pricing
As we covered, Einstein Bots are usually part of a high-tier plan or an expensive add-on.
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Included with Service Cloud Unlimited Edition: $350 per user, per month (billed annually).
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Add-on for Service Cloud Enterprise Edition: An additional $75 per user, per month.
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Usage Limits: Your license will likely cap your monthly bot conversations, making costs hard to predict and easy to exceed.
eesel AI pricing
On the other hand, eesel AI aims for a more straightforward pricing model.
| Plan | Price (Billed Annually) | AI Interactions/mo | Key Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| Team | $239 / month | Up to 1,000 | Train on docs, Slack integration, Copilot |
| Business | $639 / month | Up to 3,000 | Train on past tickets, AI Actions, API calls, simulation |
| Custom | Contact Sales | Unlimited | Advanced actions, custom integrations |
The big difference is what you're paying for. With eesel AI, there are no per-resolution fees, all core products (AI Agent, Copilot, Triage, etc.) are included in every plan, and you can pick a month-to-month option if you want. It's a clear model that's a big contrast to Salesforce's complex and often pricey structure.
Choosing the right AI chatbot for your stack
At the end of the day, the native Salesforce AI chatbot, Einstein Bots, is deeply integrated into the platform, but that comes with a high price tag, not just in dollars, but in complexity and time. If you're a huge company already paying for the top Salesforce tiers and have a dedicated dev team, it might work for you.
But for most teams, a third-party tool like eesel AI is simply a more practical way to go. It’s faster, connects to the knowledge sources you actually use, gives you more control, and comes with clear pricing. You shouldn't have to hire a developer or rebuild your entire CRM setup just to get a good AI chatbot working for your team.
Get started with a smarter AI chatbot today
Ready to see how easy it is to automate your support without the complexity of Salesforce's native tools? Start your free eesel AI trial and launch your first AI agent in minutes.
Frequently asked questions
A Salesforce AI chatbot is an AI assistant designed to converse with customers directly within the Salesforce environment, primarily Einstein Bots. Its main role is to handle common questions, gather information, and escalate complex issues to human agents.
You build an Einstein Bot using the Bot Builder in the Salesforce setup menu by creating "dialogs" and defining "entities." While it has a visual interface, a good understanding of the Salesforce ecosystem, and often Apex code for custom needs, is required.
Einstein Bots are often bundled with high-tier Salesforce plans like Service Cloud Unlimited Edition ($350/user/month) or an add-on for Enterprise Edition ($75/user/month). Additionally, pricing includes usage limits on conversations, which can lead to unpredictable overage fees.
The native Salesforce AI chatbot, Einstein Bots, is most effective when all information is in Salesforce Knowledge. Accessing external sources like Google Docs or Confluence is difficult and typically requires expensive, custom integrations, limiting the bot's overall knowledge base.
Implementing a native Salesforce AI chatbot can take weeks or even months due to the steep learning curve, technical setup requirements (like JavaScript snippets and security settings), and the need for Salesforce developer involvement for custom functionalities.
Third-party solutions are often faster to deploy, can unify knowledge from all your existing sources (not just Salesforce), and provide a more customizable workflow without requiring complex coding. They are typically more self-serve and offer clearer pricing models.
The native Salesforce AI chatbot, Einstein Bots, is usually part of expensive high-tier plans or an add-on, with conversation limits that can incur overage fees. Third-party options like eesel AI typically offer more straightforward, transparent pricing based on usage tiers with no per-resolution fees, and often include all core products in their plans.
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Article by
Kenneth Pangan
Writer and marketer for over ten years, Kenneth Pangan splits his time between history, politics, and art with plenty of interruptions from his dogs demanding attention.
