What is Tidio AI? A complete 2025 overview

If you’ve ever looked for a customer support tool, you’ve probably come across Tidio. It’s known for bundling live chat, a helpdesk, and AI chatbots into one neat package. For businesses just starting out, it can feel like a simple, unified solution that gets you up and running with customer-facing chat pretty quickly.

This post will give you a straight-up overview of Tidio AI, what it can do, and just as importantly, where it falls short. Its all-in-one nature sounds appealing, but is it the right move for teams that have already put time and effort into helpdesks like Zendesk or Freshdesk? For those who’d rather not uproot their entire support setup, AI solutions that layer on top of your existing tools can be a much more powerful and flexible way to go.

What is Tidio AI and how does it work?

Tidio AI is the artificial intelligence layer that powers the Tidio platform. The star of the show is Lyro, a conversational AI agent designed to handle common customer questions on live chat, Messenger, and Instagram. Behind the scenes, Lyro is built on Claude (a large language model from Anthropic) and uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand what people are asking and find answers from a knowledge base you set up.

At its heart, Tidio AI is a closed system. You get the chat widget, the helpdesk, and the AI from a single company. This can be great if you’re a brand new company setting up your first support channel. But for any business that already has a helpdesk, it brings up the classic “rip-and-replace” problem. To use Tidio’s AI, you have to use Tidio’s helpdesk, which can mean a painful migration of your data, workflows, and agent habits.

This is where a different type of AI tool comes into play. Solutions like eesel AI are built to plug directly into the tools you already use. Instead of forcing you to switch, they make your current helpdesk smarter, adding a powerful AI layer on top of a system your team already knows.

A breakdown of Tidio AI features

So, let’s get into the specifics. What can Tidio AI actually do for you? When you peek under the hood, you’ll find some handy features, but you might also spot a pattern: the functionality is often quite basic, which can be a problem for a growing support team.

Lyro: The Tidio AI conversational agent

Lyro is the customer-facing chatbot your users will talk to. Its main gig is to answer common questions and hopefully resolve them without needing to bother a human agent. Tidio gives you a “Playground” area, which is a sandbox where you can type in questions to see how Lyro might respond.

This is fine for spot-checking a few questions, but it doesn’t give you a real picture of how the AI will handle a flood of customer queries. A more robust approach is to test the AI against your past support tickets. For example, eesel AI’s simulation feature lets you run the bot on thousands of your historical conversations. This gives you a realistic preview of its deflection rate and shows you where your knowledge base has gaps, all before a single customer talks to it.

Tidio AI knowledge sources and training methods

So, how does Lyro actually learn? You can feed it information by letting it scrape your website, adding FAQs, or manually typing in question-and-answer pairs. This process is straightforward, but it’s also a big limitation. The AI’s knowledge is stuck with publicly available or manually entered info, which often doesn’t have the detail needed to answer more complex customer questions.

What’s missing here is the goldmine of information for any support AI: your team’s history of resolved tickets. Tidio can’t easily learn from it. An AI that can’t see how your best agents have solved real problems is always going to be a step behind. In contrast, tools like eesel AI securely train on a much wider range of your company knowledge, including private Confluence pages, Google Docs, and your team’s entire history of resolved tickets and macros. This naturally leads to more accurate and helpful answers.

Tidio AI Copilot for agent assistance

Tidio also has a Copilot feature, which is an assistant for your human agents. It suggests replies inside the chat and ticket view, using the same knowledge base as Lyro. It can also try to come up with answers on the fly if it doesn’t have one ready.

It’s a nice feature for speeding things up. But because it’s learning from the same limited info as Lyro, the suggestions might not be very helpful for tricky customer problems. An AI Copilot that learns from the richer details in past tickets and internal guides will give much more useful advice and can help new agents get up to speed way faster.

Tidio AI helpdesk and ticketing automation

Tidio has its own ticketing system for managing customer support emails, and this is where a pretty big limitation pops up. According to Tidio’s own help docs, Lyro can only reply to the first email that a customer sends. After that one automated reply, the AI is done, and your human agents have to handle every single follow-up message.

For any team that wants to automate more than just the first reply, this is a huge drawback. The AI essentially throws the conversation over the wall after one touch, creating more manual work for your team. A more useful AI agent would handle the whole conversation, not just the opening line. For instance, eesel AI’s Agent works inside helpdesks like Zendesk and Freshdesk to manage the entire ticket from start to finish—answering follow-up questions, tagging the ticket correctly, and closing it out.

Here’s a quick look at how the two workflows stack up:

Understanding Tidio AI pricing

Let’s talk money. Tidio breaks its AI pricing into a few tiers. You can get a free trial with 50 Lyro conversations, but once they’re gone, they’re gone. After that, Lyro stops working, and you have to upgrade to a paid plan.

The paid plans give you a monthly quota of conversations based on how many unique visitors talk to Lyro. As you need more conversations, you climb the pricing ladder. It’s also worth noting that you’ll have to pay for one of the pricier plans if you want to do something as simple as changing the bot’s name from “Lyro.”

How Tidio AI’s cost compares to alternatives

Tidio’s pricing can get expensive as your team grows, especially when you put it next to a more modern, all-inclusive model like the one from eesel AI. The main difference is that Tidio’s model is designed to keep you on its platform, while eesel AI is built to be a flexible layer that works with the tools you already have.
Here are a few advantages of eesel AI’s model:

• You don’t pay per agent: eesel AI’s plans are based on usage (how many AI interactions you have), not how many agents are on your team. This makes it much more affordable to scale.
• Key features are included: Important capabilities like training on past tickets, powerful AI Actions, and removing branding are part of the standard plans, not expensive add-ons.
• Costs are more predictable: The interaction-based model is straightforward. You pay for the work the AI does, not your agent headcount.

Key limitations of Tidio AI to consider

So, when you step back and look at the whole picture, a few big drawbacks stand out for any business thinking seriously about the platform.

The Tidio AI all-in-one platform dilemma

The biggest hurdle is being locked into Tidio’s ecosystem. If your business is happy with its current helpdesk, you either have to go through a painful data migration or try to manage two separate support systems. It forces you to change your tools just to use their AI, which can be a huge headache. An integrated solution like eesel AI is less disruptive because it works with the tools you already have.

Surface-level knowledge and training for Tidio AI

An AI is only as good as the data it learns from. By only letting it train on public websites and manual Q&As, Tidio AI is cut off from the best source of knowledge there is: your team’s history of solved tickets and your private internal documents. Ultimately, you end up with a less accurate bot that needs constant hand-holding from your team whenever it gets stuck.

Limited Tidio AI automation capabilities

Tidio’s automation is mostly just conversational. It can answer a question, but it can’t really perform tasks that get work done. For example, it can’t check an order status in Shopify, create a return label with an API call, and then tag the ticket in Zendesk as “Return Processed” in one smooth motion. This is what separates a simple chatbot from a true automation tool. The real magic of AI is when it can handle these kinds of practical, multi-step tasks. eesel AI’s Actions are built to do just that, turning your AI from a simple FAQ bot into a genuinely helpful teammate.

Ready to try an integrated approach beyond Tidio AI?

So, is Tidio AI the right choice? It can be a solid pick for a new business or startup without an existing support system. Its all-in-one approach can get you a started quickly without too much fuss.

But if your team is growing, or you already have a helpdesk you like, its limitations can become major roadblocks. The “rip-and-replace” approach, shallow training data, and lack of real workflow automation stop it from delivering the kind of smarts and efficiency that modern support teams really need.

Real AI-powered support should learn from your team’s experience and work with your tools, not against them. For teams that want to add powerful automation to their current helpdesk, a layered solution that works with your tools and learns from your best data is the smarter, more scalable choice.

While Tidio AI offers a place to start, modern support teams need AI that integrates deeply, learns from experience, and automates actual work. eesel AI boosts your existing helpdesk with powerful, context-aware automation that’s trained on your most valuable knowledge.

Want to see what a truly integrated AI can do? Book a demo or start your free trial today.