What Is the Best AI Agent for Customer Support in 2026? 11 Scored, Priced and Ranked

Macha is the best AI agent for customer support in 2026 on our published scorecard, at 37 out of 45, followed by Intercom Fin at 33 and Ada at 31. Our rubric counts implementation twice, because who builds the agent decides whether it goes live at all. Macha's team builds the agent on your help desk and a dedicated success manager handles your changes after go-live, on the trial and every plan, at about $0.40 a ticket. We are a vendor, Macha is built around that criterion, and it still scores zero on independent reviews. Fin charges $0.99 per outcome and publishes every rate. Every price here was read on the vendor's own page in September 2026 and re-checked on October 13, 2026, and where a vendor publishes nothing we say so instead of quoting a competitor's estimate.

Disclosure: Macha publishes this blog. Macha is one of the agents below, scored on the same rubric as everything else on this page, placed where that score puts it, and carrying the same watch-out line as every other entry.

How do the top AI support agents compare on price? (October 2026)

Legend: ✅ native · ➕ configurable, you build it · ✖ not a focus.

Three things fall out of that table that a feature comparison hides. Four of the ten will not tell you what they cost. Only two of the ten, Macha and eesel, let you pick, per agent, whether the AI answers the customer or writes a draft a human sends. And the billing unit is not a detail: an agent billed per outcome is cheapest when it closes conversations, one billed per conversation is cheapest when it stays quiet, and one billed per ticket does not care either way.

How did we score the AI agents?

Nine of the ten pages that currently rank for this search are published by a vendor selling a competing product, and every one of them puts itself in its own list. The only independent page in the set is also the only one that publishes a scoring rubric. So here is ours, in full.

Eight criteria, each scored 0 to 5, with implementation counted twice, for a maximum of 45. A product needs 23 out of 45, or 50%, to be listed here. We lowered the bar from 60% to 50% on 7 October 2026, when implementation started counting twice, so that no product left the list because of the reweighting alone. Products that scored below the line are named at the end with their score, not silently dropped.

On 7 October 2026 we split our old setup-and-support score into the last two criteria. Who builds the agent decides whether it goes live at all and what it really costs your team, so implementation counts twice. It's also the criterion Macha is built around, so weigh our scores with that in mind. On implementation, Macha scores 5: our team builds the agent on your help desk, on the trial and every plan. Ada, Forethought, Netomi, Sierra and Decagon score 3: the vendor builds the agent with you, but through a sales process and a contract. The self-serve tools score 1: you build the agent yourself. On ongoing management, Macha scores 5: a dedicated success manager handles your changes after go-live. Fin scores 3, because a dedicated support team comes with Intercom's Premier Support, a paid add-on that needs a contract, and the contract-led vendors score 3 for the same reason. The other self-serve tools score 1: you tune and maintain the agent yourself.

And the scores, every one of them, including ours:

Two honest notes about our own row. Macha scores 0 out of 5 on independent reviews, because it has none: its G2 listing showed 0 reviews when we checked it on 22 September 2026. Its 5 on implementation, counted twice, and its 5 on ongoing management are what put it first: the agent is built and run for you, with a dedicated success manager, on the trial and every plan.

Sierra and Decagon reach 27 on capability and vendor-led builds while scoring zero on pricing transparency. That is a fair description of what buying them is like. Netomi now clears the bar at 26 on the same strengths, after missing the old one by a point. My AskAI sits exactly on the bar at 23, held back by an answer-only agent and a small review base.

Do teams let AI agents reply to customers, or only draft?

Most lists in this category argue about resolution rates. We can add something smaller and more checkable: how support teams actually configure these agents once the sales cycle is over.

On 22 September 2026 we read the configuration of every agent running live on a customer's help desk in our own platform. There were 119 of them, across 62 customer organizations. Of those:

• 59 can post an internal note. Only 19 can post a public reply.
• 40 can draft but are not allowed to answer the customer at all.
• 34 can change a ticket's tags, priority, status or assignee without writing anything the customer sees.

So on our own install base, agents set up to draft for a human outnumber agents set up to answer by more than three to one. That is not an argument that autonomous resolution doesn't work. Fin, Zendesk and Gorgias all sell it and customers buy it. It is an argument that the "resolves, drafts or triages" column in the table above is the column that decides what you actually deploy in month one, and that a product which only does the first of the three is a narrower purchase than it looks.

The same read covered custom API tools, which is how an agent reaches a system the vendor has no integration for. There were 61 live custom tools, built by 13 customers. 40 of them are read-only lookups; 21 write: twenty POSTs and one PUT. One in three integrations a support team builds actually changes something. The rest just fetch.

These are aggregate counts from our own database, with no customer named and no ticket content involved. They describe our own customers, so they say little about the wider market, and they're small numbers, so treat them as a straw in the wind rather than a survey.

What are the 11 best AI agents for customer support?

1. Macha

Best for: teams that like their help desk and want an agent on top of it, priced per ticket, built for them.

Macha is our product, so read this row with that in mind. It is not a help desk and does not replace one. It runs on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom (see Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias and Front), and each agent is set to reply to the customer, write an internal note for a human, or only change fields on the ticket, and you choose which.

Setup: done for you. Your part is connecting your help desk and the tools your answers come from, about 15 minutes. Our team then analyzes about a month of your past tickets, builds the knowledge base and the agent for the first category to automate, tests it on a sample of those tickets, and runs it in safe mode, with drafts as internal notes in your help desk, until the drafts are right. It goes live in under a week, on the trial and on every plan. Ada, Sierra and Decagon also build the agent for you, but through a sales process and an annual contract; eesel and My AskAI are self-serve below their Enterprise plans.

Key features: per-agent choice of public reply, internal note or triage; custom API tools so an agent can call a system we have no integration for; scheduled triggers; simulation against past tickets before go-live; the integrations list covers Shopify, Slack, Notion, Jira, HubSpot, Stripe, Confluence and Google Workspace.

Pros: every price is published, the billing unit is a ticket rather than a resolution, and setup and monitoring by our team is included on every plan rather than sold as an implementation fee. Because the unit is a ticket, a long thread costs the same as a one-line answer, and the model the agent runs on does not change the bill.

Where it falls short: three real ones. It has no independent review base: zero G2 reviews as of 22 September 2026, against 7,075 for Zendesk and 3,912 for Fin, and you should weight that. It has no voice and no social channel, so a team that needs an agent on the phone should look at Fin, Ada or Sierra. And it only works if you are on a help desk it connects to (the integrations page has the current list); if you are on Help Scout, Zoho Desk or Salesforce, we are not an option at all.

Pricing: one plan priced on monthly ticket volume, from $299 a month for 750 tickets up to $3,999 for 10,000, about $0.40 a ticket at every tier, billed monthly, custom above 10,000 tickets. A ticket is one thread with one person, charged once however many replies it takes. At the entry tier, $299 gets you 750 tickets on Macha and 500 on eesel: $0.40 a ticket against $0.60, with setup done for you included. The price also covers a dedicated success manager who handles your changes after go-live: new ticket categories, instruction edits, new tools. Trial is $50 of free usage with no credit card. Full detail on our pricing page.

2. Intercom Fin

Best for: teams that want the most capable agent with a rate they can calculate before they sign.

Fin is the AI agent from the company formerly called Intercom, which renamed itself Fin on 12 May 2026; Salesforce completed its acquisition on 10 September 2026. It runs natively inside Intercom and also connects to Zendesk and Salesforce, which is why it turns up on shortlists for help desks it does not own. Our Fin explainer covers the setup in detail.

Key features: knowledge grounded in your help center and past conversations; Procedures, which are configurable multi-step workflows that can end in a handoff; actions that call your systems; voice, chat, email and social; reporting that separates resolutions from escalations.

Pros: the rate card is unusually complete. fin.ai/pricing names five billable outcomes (resolutions, Procedure handoffs, disqualifications, self-serve routings and qualifications) and, crucially, one thing that is not billable, verbatim: "You're not charged when a conversation is simply passed to your team without an outcome." It has the largest review base here by a distance.

Where it falls short: the outcome definition does real work in your favor and theirs. A Resolution is "No further help is requested after Fin's last answer", so a customer who gives up counts the same as a customer who was helped. Procedure handoffs bill at the full $0.99 even though a human still does the work, and a Qualification costs $9.99. And on Intercom the $0.99 sits on top of help desk seats at $29 (Essential; Intercom is also testing $19 with some visitors), $85 (Advanced) or $132 (Expert) a seat a month billed annually. Off Intercom there are no seats, but a monthly minimum of 50 outcomes applies. Fin isn't a cheap way to avoid buying a help desk.

Pricing: $0.99 per outcome for resolutions, Procedure handoffs, self-serve routings and disqualifications; $9.99 per qualification; 50-outcome monthly minimum when Fin runs on a help desk other than Intercom.

3. Ada

Best for: mid-market and enterprise brands that want a mature, multilingual agent across voice and chat and have a budget line for it.

Ada is one of the oldest names in this category and one of the most consistently cited. It runs alongside Zendesk, Salesforce and Front rather than replacing them. Our Ada guide has the full picture.

Key features: reasoning engine with coached behaviors in place of flow trees; voice, chat, email and social; 50+ languages; an actions framework for order and account operations; an evaluation suite.

Pros: 4.6 from 173 ratings on G2 is the strongest independent evidence of any product here that is not a help desk vendor, and the multilingual coverage is genuinely deep.

Where it falls short: Ada's own pricing page at ada.cx/pricing carries no price at all. When we opened it on 22 September 2026 it was a demo booking form, and the site returns 403 to any automated reader, so we cannot link it here. The one price Ada publishes itself is on its Salesforce AgentExchange listing: from $30,000 a year per company, checked 25 September 2026. The AWS Marketplace listing pictured above showed $35,000 for a 12-month contract on 22 September and now shows custom pricing only; a second Ada listing on AWS, "Ada - AI Agent", sold 60,000 conversations a year for $33,000 on 25 September and was gone by 13 October 2026 (AWS now returns "Page not found"). Ada's newer AWS listing, "Ada for Travel & Hospitality", charges $0.55 a conversation on a 12-month contract ($0.52 on 24 months, $0.49 on 36), checked 13 October 2026, and Ada's own Azure Marketplace listing has a public plan at $250,000 a year. Beyond those, the figures are third-party: Vendr's median of $72,000 a year from 119 purchases by 35 buyers, with the middle 80% of deals between $36,211 and $286,200 (checked 13 October 2026). Those are real contracts, but they are a wide spread, and the one per-conversation rate Ada publishes is on a travel-industry listing. Deployment is a project measured in months.

Pricing: not published on Ada's site. From $30,000 a year on Salesforce AgentExchange; Vendr median $72,000 a year.

4. Forethought

Best for: Zendesk or Salesforce teams that want triage and routing automated as seriously as answering.

Forethought has been acquired by Zendesk, and its own site now carries a "Forethought AI Agents by Zendesk" logo. It remains sold as a separate product with its own plans. Our Forethought guide has the history.

Key features: Solve (the agent), Triage (predictive ticket fields and routing), Assist (agent-side drafting) and Discover (gap analysis); add-ons for multibrand, an analytics API and Discover.

Pros: the triage half is better developed than most competitors'. Predicting fields and routing is a different job from answering, and Forethought treats it as one. 4.3 from 166 G2 ratings is a solid evidence base.

Where it falls short: the pricing page names three plans, Team, Professional and Enterprise, and no numbers. Forethought's own words, verbatim: "Our pricing model is a blend of platform access fees and an outcome-based pricing cost. Optional add-ons can be added to customize the platform. Please consult with our sales team for a detailed pricing structure." There's no trial either. The page says "we offer a Proof of Value (POV) instead of a traditional free trial". And its future is now a Zendesk roadmap decision, which is a real risk if you are not a Zendesk customer.

Pricing: not published. Platform access fee plus outcome-based usage, by quote.

5. Sierra

Best for: large enterprises building a branded agent as a programme, with the team to run it.

Sierra sells "Agents as a Service" and is explicit that it charges for outcomes. Its blog states the model in one line: "you pay for results, not tokens." Our Sierra guide covers the architecture.

Key features: an agent development environment with versioning and evaluation; voice with custom personas; a supervisor model that checks the agent's own output; deep custom integrations built with you.

Pros: capability is at the top of this list (multi-step, multi-channel, genuinely able to complete transactions) and 4.5 from 130 G2 ratings is more evidence than most enterprise entrants have.

Where it falls short: sierra.ai/pricing returns a 404. On the site as we read it there was no self-serve route, no trial and no published rate, so estimating a bill means starting a sales process. Every dollar figure circulating for Sierra comes from competitors' blogs, and we are not going to launder those into a table. Time to a live answer is measured in months, and the implementation is a joint project.

Pricing: not published. Outcome-based, by annual contract.

6. Decagon

Best for: high-volume consumer brands and fintechs that want a custom enterprise agent without building one from scratch.

Decagon is the other enterprise name that appears on nearly every assistant-generated shortlist in this category. Our Decagon guide has the detail.

Key features: Agent Operating Procedures written in natural language; a conversation analytics layer; voice and chat; enterprise security and audit tooling.

Pros: the highest G2 rating on this page, 4.8, level with Netomi on almost twice the ratings, and reviewers consistently name fast implementation relative to other enterprise agents.

Where it falls short: decagon.ai/pricing returns a 404 as well, and the only route in is a work-email demo form. Its AWS Marketplace listings are $1,000,000 private-offer placeholders, which tell you nothing except that the real number is negotiated. Vendr's data puts the median Decagon buyer at $432,750 a year, by far the largest figure on this page. And 30 G2 ratings is a thin base for a purchase that size.

Pricing: not published. Per conversation, annual contract; Vendr median $432,750 a year.

7. Gorgias AI Agent

Best for: Shopify and ecommerce brands already on Gorgias who want the agent to cancel, refund and discount, not just answer.

Gorgias sells the help desk and the agent as one bill. Its own page puts it plainly: "AI Agent on every plan, pay only when it resolves a conversation." Our Gorgias AI Agent explainer covers what it can and cannot do.

Key features: pre-trained on ecommerce verticals; Actions that cancel orders, apply discounts and process returns on Pro and Advanced; brand voice and guardrails; native Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce.

Pros: it has the richest shipped write-action catalog of anything on this list that you can buy self-serve, and the plans bundle help desk and AI so there is one number to approve.

Where it falls short: it's Gorgias or nothing, because no version of this runs on your Zendesk. And its pricing page contradicts itself. Each plan card says overage is "$1.50 per automated interaction fee past your limit", while the comparison table lower down the same page prints the per-automated-interaction rate as $1.00 on Starter, $0.90 on Basic and Pro and $0.85 on Advanced. We could not reconcile the two, so model the higher one. The included allowances are also small relative to the ticket counts: Pro includes 2,000 tickets and 190 automated interactions.

Pricing (read 2026-09-22): Starter $40 a month (50 tickets, 30 automated interactions); Basic $90 monthly or $77 billed annually (300 tickets); Pro $550 / $471 (2,000 tickets, 190 interactions); Advanced $1,430 / $1,227 (5,000 tickets, 530 interactions).

8. eesel AI

Best for: teams that want a self-serve agent with unlimited seats, billed in monthly credit batches.

eesel is a self-serve agent layer sold in monthly credit batches. It connects to Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom and Gorgias among others, and it will draft or reply depending on how you configure it. Our eesel guide and our three-way comparison go deeper.

Key features: knowledge from help centers, past tickets and documents; a simulation mode; one credit per ticket or chat, however long it runs; a browser copilot as well as a ticket agent.

Pros: agents and seats are unlimited on every plan, and a free plan gives 100 credits with no card. The batches get cheaper per ticket as they grow: 500 credits for $299 (about $0.60 each), 1,000 for $499, 5,000 for $1,749 (about $0.35 each).

Where it falls short: the 20 ratings on G2 are a small evidence base for a product this widely cited. Unused credits don't roll over, so a quiet month still costs the full monthly batch, and overage past it is $0.80 a credit if you turn it on. Write actions are something you configure through their API; there's no shipped catalog of order operations.

Pricing: $299 a month for 500 credits up to $1,749 for 5,000, where one ticket or chat is one credit; optional overage at $0.80 a credit; a year paid upfront gets two months free; free plan with 100 credits. Enterprise is priced on request.

9. Netomi

Best for: large brands in travel, insurance or telecom that want a vendor-run program and can fund a six-figure pilot.

Netomi sells enterprise AI agents across chat, email, voice and messaging, with integrations its AWS listing names as Amazon Connect, Salesforce and Zendesk. Our Netomi guide has the detail.

Key features: agents for chat, email, voice and messaging; integrations with Amazon Connect, Salesforce and Zendesk; a fully supported proof of concept run with Netomi's team before production.

Pros: the build is vendor-led, so your team isn't the one setting it up, and the reviews that exist are warm: 4.8 on G2.

Where it falls short: there is no price on its site. Its AWS Marketplace listing prices a one-month proof of concept at $100,000, with production pricing by private offer after it, and Vendr's median contract is $85,000 a year. Sixteen G2 ratings is a thin base for a purchase that size.

Pricing: not published. Annual contract after a $100,000 one-month pilot; Vendr median $85,000 a year.

10. Zendesk AI agents

Best for: Zendesk customers who would rather add a line to an existing bill than onboard a second vendor.

Zendesk folded its acquired agent technology, including Forethought, into the Suite, and retired the old Advanced AI add-on. The result is an agent you switch on inside the product you already administer. Our Zendesk AI explainer and Zendesk AI pricing breakdown go through the mechanics.

Key features: agents for messaging, email and voice; a generative answer mode grounded in help center articles; procedures and actions; the whole of Zendesk's routing, SLA and reporting stack behind it.

Pros: nothing else here has this much independent review evidence: 4.3 from 7,075 ratings on G2. And Zendesk now publishes its rate, which it did not always.

Where it falls short: pricing it is genuinely hard, and not because the numbers are hidden. Two allowance systems are live at the same time. The current one gives you a monthly dollar allowance per seat: $2 on Suite Team, $5 on Growth and Professional, $10 on Enterprise, capped at $5,000 a year. Meanwhile the pricing page still publishes the older per-agent resolution counts for accounts that have not been migrated. You also need to know that only verified resolutions bill: assisted escalations and contained resolutions do not. Working out next month's number takes a spreadsheet. And it only runs on Zendesk.

Pricing: $1.50 per automated resolution on a committed plan, $2.00 pay-as-you-go, minus your seat allowance, on top of Suite seats from $55 a seat a month billed annually.

11. My AskAI

Best for: small teams that want an agent switched on this week, cheaply, with a real trial.

My AskAI is the cheapest credible option here and the most direct about it. Its own pricing page reads: "Pricing so good, we don't need to hide it behind a sales call."

Key features: connects to Zendesk, Intercom and Freshdesk; answers from your help center and documents; escalation with context; a 30-day free trial.

Pros: the entry price is a fraction of everything else on this list, the trial is the longest here, and the headline offer is a 60% AI resolution rate "or your money back", which is an unusual thing for a vendor to put in writing.

Where it falls short: it's an answering agent rather than an acting one, with no meaningful catalog of write actions, so WISMO questions that need an order lookup and a change are not its ground. The review base is small (4.5 from 23 on G2). And there is a discrepancy worth knowing: the page's own structured data claims a 4.9 rating from 19 reviews, which is not what G2 shows.

Pricing: Pro $199 a month, Scale $499 a month, both after a 30-day free trial; the page headlines "from $0.10 per ticket" without tying that rate to a named tier.

Which AI agents did not make the cut, and why?

After the 7 October change, every product we scored clears 23 out of 45. These were considered and left out for other reasons:

• Chatbase and other site-widget builders. Good products, wrong job: they answer on your website instead of inside your help desk queue, so they score 1 or 2 on the criterion this page cares most about.
• Voice-first platforms such as Retell, Vapi and ElevenLabs Agents. They build excellent phone agents, but a support ticket queue is not what they are for.
• Salesforce Agentforce and Freshdesk's Freddy AI Agent are both real AI agents for support and both publish rates ($0.005 per Flex Credit at 20 credits an action, and $49 per 100 sessions respectively). They are excluded here for the same reason Zendesk nearly was: they are only available to customers of their own platform, and we cover them in our AI help desk roundup instead.

How does the billing unit change what you pay?

Four meters are in use on this page, and each one pays the vendor for something different. It is worth knowing whose incentive you are buying into.

The per-outcome meters are the ones to read closely, because the definition is the price. Fin counts a resolution as "No further help is requested after Fin's last answer", so a customer who gave up and emailed a different address counts. Zendesk bills only verified resolutions, which is stricter and better for you. Gorgias bills per automated interaction, which is looser than either. Our explainer on what deflection rate actually measures is the background reading if you are about to sign something priced this way.

How do you choose an AI agent for your help desk?

Start with the help desk, not the agent. If you are on Intercom, Fin is the default and everything else is a compromise. If you are on Zendesk, you have the most choice on this page: Zendesk's own agents, Fin, Ada, Forethought and Macha all run there. If you are on Gorgias, its own agent is bundled and hard to beat on price. If you are on Freshdesk or Front, the list shortens to Macha, eesel and Freddy (Freshdesk only). If you are on HubSpot, Macha runs there too.

Then decide what you want the agent to do in month one. Our own numbers above say most teams start with drafting, and a product that only resolves cannot be dialled down. Then read the billing unit and the resolution definition before you read the feature list, because that is where the surprises live. And pilot on real tickets: a published resolution rate is a ceiling, and it moves with the quality of your knowledge base more than with the vendor.

If your question is less "which agent" and more "which tickets should be automated at all", our customer service automation guide is the better starting point, and our primer on how AI agents differ from chatbots covers the vocabulary.

How was this research done?

Every price on this page was read on the vendor's own live page between 18 and 22 September 2026, and the Fin, Intercom, Gorgias and eesel rates were rechecked on 24 September 2026 (eesel's again on 6 October 2026, after it moved to monthly credit batches), and the month is in the table header because these rates change. On 13 October 2026 we re-read every price in the comparison table and none had changed. Zendesk's pricing page showed no US-dollar committed rate from our location, so its $1.50 committed and $2.00 pay-as-you-go rates come from the Internet Archive's 12 October 2026 capture of its US pricing page. Where a vendor publishes nothing (Ada, Forethought, Sierra, Decagon) we say so and give the marketplace or contract-data figure with its publisher named, rather than repeating a competitor's estimate as if it were a price. Ratings were read in a logged-out Chrome session on 22 September 2026 for Forethought, eesel, My AskAI, Ada and Macha; the Zendesk, Fin, Gorgias, Sierra and Decagon counts were read in Chrome on 18 and 19 September 2026.

The implementation and ongoing-management scores, split from one setup-and-support score on 7 October 2026, come from what each vendor's own site says about who builds and runs the agent, and from the entries below. Fin's 3 on ongoing management comes from Intercom's pricing page, which lists Premier Support among the services that need a contract, and its help center, which describes Premier Support as a paid add-on with a dedicated team.

We did not build a production agent on any of these platforms for this guide, and we are not claiming benchmark results we did not run. The first-party numbers in the "resolve" section are aggregate configuration counts read from our own database on 22 September 2026. No customer is named and no ticket content was used. We could not verify Zoho Desk's US dollar prices from either a scripted fetch or a browser, because Zoho serves our location in rupees, so Zoho is not on this page.

We are a vendor. Macha is first on a rubric that counts implementation twice, the criterion Macha is built around, and we say so. It also carries a zero on independent reviews and a named gap on voice and social.

Frequently asked questions

What are AI agents for customer support? They are AI systems that handle a customer conversation end to end: reading the question, grounding the answer in your knowledge base, calling your systems to look something up or change it, and escalating to a person with context when they cannot finish. That is different from a chatbot, which routes, and from an AI copilot, which only helps a human write. Our chatbot versus agent primer has the full distinction.

What is the best AI agent for customer support in 2026? On our scorecard, Macha, at 37 out of 45. The Macha team analyzes your past tickets, builds the knowledge base and the agent on your existing help desk, and a dedicated success manager handles your changes after go-live, included on the trial and every plan at about $0.40 a ticket. It has no independent reviews yet and no voice channel. Intercom Fin is second at 33: it publishes every rate, has the largest independent review base of anything here, and runs on Intercom, Zendesk and Salesforce.

How much do AI support agents cost? The published ones range from about $0.10 a ticket (My AskAI's headline rate) to $2.00 a resolution (Zendesk pay-as-you-go). The unpublished ones are an order of magnitude above that: Vendr's median Ada contract is $72,000 a year and its median Decagon contract is $432,750 a year. The number that matters is your billing unit multiplied by your real volume, not the headline rate.

Which AI agent works with Zendesk? More of them than with any other help desk. Zendesk's own AI agents, Intercom Fin, Ada, Forethought and Macha all run on Zendesk, and eesel and My AskAI connect too. If you want the agent to live in Zendesk without adopting Zendesk's per-resolution meter, the agent-layer products are the route, and that's the job Macha on Zendesk does. Macha is also the done-for-you option among them: the Macha team analyzes your past tickets, builds the knowledge base and the agent, and runs it in safe mode until the drafts are right, included on the trial and every plan at about $0.40 a ticket.

Do AI agents really resolve 70 to 90% of tickets? Sometimes, and you should treat any single percentage as a ceiling. Published rates vary enormously with the quality of your help center and how many of your tickets need a system lookup instead of an answer. My AskAI is unusual in guaranteeing a number: 60% "or your money back". Pilot on your own tickets and measure it yourself.

Should the AI reply to customers or draft for my team? Most teams start with drafting. On our own production data, 59 of 119 live agents can post an internal note and only 19 can post a public reply, and 40 can draft but are not allowed to answer at all. Drafting is lower-risk, it gets your team comfortable with the output, and on most of these products it is a configuration choice rather than a different purchase. Not all of them offer it, though: check the "resolves, drafts or triages" column before you buy.

Can an AI agent issue a refund or change an order? Some can. Gorgias, Fin, Ada, Sierra and Decagon all ship catalogs of write actions; Macha and eesel let you build them as custom API calls; My AskAI is an answering agent and does not really do this. It is worth checking what the vendor means, because "integrations" often means reading from a system without writing to it. In our own install base, only 21 of 61 customer-built custom tools write anything at all.

What is the difference between per resolution and per ticket pricing? Per resolution means you pay when the AI closes a conversation without a human, so the vendor's revenue depends on a definition they wrote. Per ticket means you pay for every conversation the AI touches, resolved or not, so the bill is predictable but nothing in the meter rewards the vendor for deflecting more. Per conversation sits in between. None of the three is dishonest; they just point the vendor's effort in different directions.

Is Macha a Zendesk alternative? No. Macha is not a help desk and does not replace Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom. It's an AI agent layer that runs on top of them. If you need a help desk you still need to buy one; Macha makes the one you already have resolve, draft or triage more on its own.

So which AI support agent should you buy?

Macha scores highest on our rubric, and it's the pick if you want the agent built and run for you rather than by your team. Intercom Fin is second, publishes its rates and has the evidence base to back it. Zendesk's own AI agents are the shortest path if you are already on Zendesk, as long as you are prepared to work out the allowance arithmetic. Gorgias AI Agent and eesel AI score well on everything except setup, which they leave to you, and deserve a look if you'd rather build it yourself. The enterprise names, Ada, Forethought, Netomi, Sierra, Decagon, are the most capable and the least transparent, and every one of them is a sales process with a quote at the end.

And if you want an agent that resolves, drafts or triages inside the help desk you already run, with a published per-ticket price and the build done for you, that is the job Macha does. About $0.40 a ticket covers the setup and a dedicated success manager who handles your changes, so your team doesn't manage the AI itself. The trade-offs: no independent reviews yet, no voice channel, and a limited set of supported help desks. Start a $50 trial with no credit card or read the full pricing before you talk to anyone.

Sources: fin.ai/pricing · intercom.com/pricing · Zendesk outcome-based pricing · Zendesk: managing resolution allowances · gorgias.com/pricing · eesel.ai/pricing · myaskai.com/pricing · forethought.ai/pricing · sierra.ai/blog · decagon.ai · Macha pricing