What Is the Best AI Help Desk Software in 2026? 11 Scored, With Real Prices

The short answer. Eleven products clear the 18-out-of-30 cut-off below. Intercom and Gorgias score highest at 26, then Freshdesk at 24, Zendesk and Tidio at 23, Freshservice, Zoho Desk, Jira Service Management and Front at 22, and Help Scout and HubSpot Service Hub at 21. The score is a floor, not an order: pick Zendesk for a large support team on many channels, Freshdesk or Zoho Desk on a tight budget, Help Scout for a small email-first team, Intercom when the AI should answer most of the chat, Gorgias for Shopify, and Freshservice or Jira Service Management for IT support.

It also covers the third route most lists skip, which is keeping the help desk you have and adding AI agents on top. Macha publishes this page and makes that kind of product, so it is deliberately absent from the ranking and appears once, in a clearly marked section. Every price was read on the vendor's own live page in September 2026, with one labeled exception.

Which AI help desk fits your situation?

How do the AI help desks compare on price and AI? (September 2026)

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

"Priced per" is the column nobody else compares, and it decides more bills than any feature does. Nine of the eleven charge for people; Gorgias charges for tickets and Tidio for conversations, which inverts the arithmetic for a small team handling a lot of volume.

What does a month cost with 8 agents and 900 AI resolutions?

Each row uses the cheapest plan on that vendor's own price list that includes its AI agent, annual billing where it is offered, and 900 AI resolutions a month. Every number is reproducible from the rates in the entries below.

Four caveats worth reading before anyone quotes that table.

The two cheapest rows are cheap for opposite reasons. Zoho Desk bundles Zia into the seat and publishes no per-resolution meter, which means the AI is free in the sense that you cannot meter it or audit it either. Jira Service Management includes its virtual service agent on Premium, with 700 Rovo credits per user a month attached, which is generous until the credits run out.

Front's row uses its resolution rate. Autopilot bills each conversation once at the highest level it reaches: $0.05 for triage, $0.39 for a handoff and $0.89 for a resolution (as of October 2026, per Front's Autopilot pricing), so 900 resolutions are 900 × $0.89 = $801. An earlier version of this table used the "starting at $0.05" price from Front's pricing page ($45, for a $565 month), but $0.05 covers triage only, such as tagging and routing. Because the full rate card is now published, Front scores 5 for published pricing as of October 2026, up from 4 when only the floor was public, for 22 out of 30.

Zendesk's row moves most with your assumptions. Zendesk's pricing page says AI agents are included and billed per automated resolution, and lists $1.50 per committed resolution, which is the rate this row uses. At the $2.00 pay-as-you-go rate, the same month is $2,224. Zendesk also says AI agents come with every Support plan, so the $19 Support Team seat would cut the seat line to $152. The $16 is eight seats times Zendesk's $2 monthly dollar allowance on Suite Team; on Suite Professional the allowance is $5 a seat but the seat is $115, so the total rises.

HubSpot's $1,500 onboarding fee is not in the monthly column because it is not monthly. It is roughly four months of the AI bill, paid once, before anything runs.

How did we score the products, and what is the cut-off?

Most pages ranking for this search are published by someone selling one of the products on them, ours included. The only way to make that useful instead of worthless is to publish the scoring so you can check it. Six criteria, each 0 to 5, maximum 30. A product needs 18 out of 30, or 60%, to be listed. Anything below is named at the end with its score.

Three scores that look wrong at a glance and are not. Zendesk gets 3 for published pricing despite publishing more than most, because the allowance is stated two ways (resolutions per agent and dollars per seat) and costing next month takes a spreadsheet. Zoho Desk also gets 3, not because Zoho hides anything but because we could not read its dollar prices at all. HubSpot gets 1 for entry cost because of the $1,500 onboarding fee, which never shows up in a seat-price comparison and is real money.

Macha is not scored here. It is not a help desk, and putting a non-help-desk on a help-desk rubric would rig the table one way or the other.

Do you need a customer support help desk or an IT service desk?

The products look alike (tickets, queues, SLAs) but they are built for different requesters, and the AI is billed differently in each half.

Team size is the second question. Under about ten agents the simplest tool with AI included usually wins. Past fifty, routing, reporting and AI governance matter more than seat price. Our explainer on help desk versus service desk covers the IT side in more detail.

How many teams let the AI answer customers directly?

Vendors in this category argue about resolution rates. We can add something narrower and checkable: what teams actually switch on once the contract is signed.

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

• 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 requester sees.

Agents configured to draft outnumber agents configured to answer by more than three to one on our own install base. That is not evidence that autonomous resolution fails; Zendesk, Fin and Gorgias all sell it and customers buy it. It is evidence that the "resolves, drafts or triages" column decides your first month, and that a product which only resolves cannot be dialed back.

The same read covered custom API tools, which is how an agent reaches a system with no packaged integration: 61 live tools built by 13 customers, of which 40 are read-only lookups and 21 write (twenty POSTs, one PUT). Roughly one integration in three changes anything. These are aggregate counts from our own database, with no customer named and no ticket content involved. They describe our own customers rather than the market.

Customer support help desks with AI

Zendesk

Zendesk is the reference point for customer support help desks: triggers, automations, macros and skills-based routing, plus two AI products. AI agents are included on every Suite and Support plan with a monthly dollar allowance per agent seat ($2 on Team, $5 on Growth and Professional, $10 on Enterprise, capped at $5,000 a year, in place since 18 May 2026), billed per automated resolution beyond it at $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go, per the pricing page. That page's plan table states the same allowance as 5 included automated resolutions per agent a month on Support Team and Suite Team and 10 on Suite Professional (up to 10,000 a year). Copilot adds drafting, summaries and intelligent triage for $50 per agent a month on Suite Professional and above. Zendesk also completed its acquisition of Forethought, the AI agent company, on 26 March 2026.

G2 shows 4.3 from 7,075 reviews and Gartner Peer Insights 4.4 from 1,049. "Missing Features" (216) and "Learning Curve" (179) are the most common complaint tags. A support coordinator wrote that "implementing both the customer-facing AI agents and the agent-assist capabilities requires time and effort" (G2, May 2023).

Where it falls short: the AI bill is hard to predict and hard even to model. The allowance is stated two ways (resolutions per agent on the pricing page, dollars per seat in the help center), the rate depends on whether you commit ($1.50) or pay as you go ($2.00), and only verified resolutions bill, which helps you but adds a variable. At 900 resolutions on eight Suite Team seats that is $1,774 to $2,224 a month. Skip it if a predictable AI line matters more than depth. Our Zendesk AI explainer covers both products.

Pricing: Support Team $19, Suite Team $55, Suite Professional $115 per agent a month annual, Suite Enterprise by quote (Growth no longer appears on the pricing page); Copilot $50 per agent on Professional and higher; automated resolutions billed beyond the seat allowance at $1.50 committed or $2.00 pay-as-you-go, per Zendesk's pricing page.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk offers the same shape for less: Growth $19, Pro $55 and Enterprise $89 per agent a month on annual billing. Freddy AI Copilot (drafts, summaries, suggested articles) is $29 per agent a month on Pro and Enterprise. Freddy AI Agent answers customers: 500 free sessions come once per account, then $49 per 100 sessions, and an email session covers 72 hours of replies.

G2 shows 4.4 from 3,771 reviews; Gartner 4.4 from 671 for Freshdesk Omni. The complaint that recurs is plan gating: a technical support engineer at a mid-market company wrote that "some of its advanced features require a subscription" (G2, June 2026).

Where it falls short: Freshdesk has no free plan on its pricing page. The old "up to 10 agents, free forever" plan is gone; what remains is a Free program for up to 2 agents that lasts 6 months, or a 14-day trial. The 500 complimentary sessions are once per account rather than monthly, and sessions bill whether they resolve or not, so an agent that starts many conversations it cannot finish is expensive. More in our Freddy AI explainer.

Pricing: Growth $19, Pro $55, Enterprise $89 per agent a month annual; Freddy AI Copilot $29 per agent; Freddy AI Agent 500 free sessions once per account, then $49 per 100 sessions.

Help Scout

Help Scout is the simplest customer help desk here, and the one Google's AI Overview recommends for small email-first teams. AI Assist, AI Drafts and AI Summarize are included with unlimited use on Standard and Plus, which answers the common search for a help desk with AI-suggested replies and ticket summaries. AI Answers, the customer-facing agent, is an add-on at $0.75 per resolution with a three-month free trial for new accounts.

G2 shows 4.4 from 431 reviews. Gartner has a single review, too few to mean anything. An operations manager at a mid-market financial services company wrote that "the native reporting and operational analytics are a bit too basic for my needs" (G2, May 2026), and "Lack of Features" is its top complaint tag.

Where it falls short: the independent evidence base is thin against its rivals, 431 ratings against Zendesk's 7,075, there is no meaningful catalog of write actions, and reporting is the recurring complaint. Skip it if you need deep routing, SLAs across many teams, or voice. Pricing detail is in our Help Scout pricing guide.

Pricing: Free for 5 users, 1 inbox and 1 Docs site; Standard $25, Plus $45, Pro $75 per user a month; AI Answers $0.75 per resolution.

Intercom

Intercom is a chat-first help desk with Fin built in, and Fin also sells on its own for other help desks. The company renamed itself Fin on 12 May 2026, and Salesforce completed its acquisition on 10 September 2026.

G2 now redirects Intercom's reviews to the Fin listing, at 4.5 from 3,912, with Gartner showing Fin AI Agent at 4.6 from 18. The handoff is where users push back: a customer support specialist wrote that "by the time the conversation is handed over to the human queue, there can be a lot of chat history for us to go through" (G2, September 2026).

Where it falls short: it is the most expensive seat on this page, and the entry plan is moving under buyers. Essential is $29 a seat billed annually on intercom.com/pricing, and Intercom has also shown $19 in a pricing test, so check the page on the day you buy. Fin's outcome definition also favors Intercom: a resolution is "No further help is requested after Fin's last answer", and a Procedure handoff bills the full $0.99 even though a person finishes the work. See Intercom pricing and our Fin guide.

Pricing: Essential $29 a seat a month billed annually (Intercom has also shown $19 in a pricing test); Advanced $85; Expert $132. Fin $0.99 per outcome, $9.99 per qualification; the 50-outcome monthly minimum applies only when Fin runs on a help desk other than Intercom.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot's help desk shares a database with its CRM, so its Customer Agent reads contacts, deals and past tickets without an integration. The agent uses 50 HubSpot credits per resolved conversation, and Professional's 3,000 included credits cover 60 resolutions a month before you buy more at $9 per 1,000 credits on annual billing, which is $0.45 a resolution ($0.50 at list). HubSpot also offers a 14-day free trial of Customer Agent. G2 shows 4.4 from 3,014 reviews.

Where it falls short: the entry cost. Professional starts at $90 a seat a month and carries a one-time $1,500 onboarding fee, Enterprise $150 with $3,500. Credits are shared across every HubSpot AI feature, so the support agent competes for them with marketing and sales. And none of it makes sense unless HubSpot is already your CRM. More in our HubSpot Breeze agent guide.

Pricing: Free up to 2 users; Professional from $90 a seat a month plus $1,500 onboarding; Enterprise from $150 plus $3,500; Customer Agent 50 credits per resolved conversation, extra credits $9 per 1,000 on annual billing.

Gorgias

Gorgias is built for Shopify stores and prices by ticket volume rather than seats, which its own page states directly: "Helpdesk scales from 50 to 5,000 tickets a month, never priced per agent." Its AI Agent ships with Actions that cancel orders, apply discounts and process returns on Pro and above. G2 shows 4.6 from 582 reviews.

Where it falls short: its pricing page contradicts itself. The plan cards say overage is "$1.50 per automated interaction fee past your limit", while the comparison table lower on the same page prints $1.00 on Starter, $0.90 on Basic and Pro and $0.85 on Advanced. We could not reconcile them, so the cost model above uses the higher figure. The included AI allowances are also thin against the ticket counts: Pro bundles 2,000 tickets and only 190 automated interactions. Outside ecommerce it is the wrong fit. See our Gorgias AI Agent explainer.

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

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk has the lowest paid seat here, and Zia, its AI, is included from Professional and now ships as role-based "Zia Agents". G2 shows 4.4 from 7,947 reviews, the largest review base on this page.

Where it falls short: we could not read Zoho's dollar prices. zoho.com serves our location in rupees from both a scripted fetch and a real browser, so the figures below come from G2's pricing tab, read on 22 September 2026, which G2 itself says was last updated on 29 April 2026. Treat them as indicative. Zia and Blueprint also need Professional, so the $7 Express plan is rules only, and there is no published per-resolution meter to audit. More in what is Zoho Desk.

Pricing (from G2's pricing tab, not Zoho's own page): Free for 3 agents; Express $7, Standard $14, Professional $23, Enterprise $40 per user a month.

Front

Front is a shared inbox that works like a help desk, built for teams where several people work the same thread. Copilot handles drafting and suggestions; Autopilot is the AI agent. G2 shows 4.7 from 2,511 reviews, the highest satisfaction score here.

Where it falls short: add-on creep. Copilot is $20 a seat below Enterprise, and as of October 2026 Smart QA and Smart CSAT are Enterprise only rather than add-ons. Starter at $25 a seat is single-channel, so omnichannel actually starts at $65. And Autopilot's resolution rate is $0.89, so Front's month in the cost model is $1,321, mid-table. Our Front AI comparison covers the trade-off.

Pricing: Starter $25, Professional $65, Enterprise $105 per seat a month annual; Copilot $20 a seat; Autopilot $0.05 triage, $0.39 handoff or $0.89 resolution per conversation, billed once (as of October 2026).

Tidio

Tidio is chat software with a help desk and an AI agent, Lyro, aimed at small websites. Lyro is also sold on its own for Zendesk and Salesforce. G2 shows 4.6 from 1,962 reviews, and it is the quickest setup on this page for a small store.

Where it falls short: three limits get confused constantly and Tidio's page does not separate them well. The free plan's 50 billable conversations a month is not the 100 unique visitors that cap Flows, and neither is the 50 Lyro AI conversations, which are a one-off lifetime allowance. Lyro's price then climbs in conversation tiers, and cost is the loudest theme in its G2 con tags. Email ticketing is thin next to the rest of this page. See our Lyro explainer.

Pricing: Free, 50 billable conversations a month, up to 10 seats; Starter $24.17 a month; Lyro from $32.50 a month for 50 Lyro conversations.

AI service desks for IT support

Most of the page-one results for this search are about IT: lists of AI IT help desks, an r/sysadmin thread asking whether anyone runs an AI service desk beyond a pilot, and definitions from several vendors. The IT version of the question is whether AI can close the high-volume, low-judgment requests, password resets, access and "how do I", that clog an internal queue.

Freshservice

Freshservice is Freshworks' IT service desk: incidents, service requests, changes and assets in one place. Starter is $19, Growth $49 and Pro $99 per agent a month on annual billing, with Enterprise by quote. Freddy AI Copilot is $29 per agent on Pro and Enterprise, and Enterprise includes Freddy AI Agent (Classic) with 1,200 sessions a year per license, where a session is one employee's conversation within 24 hours.

G2 shows 4.6 from 1,355 reviews and Gartner 4.3 from 204 in its AI for IT service management market. The complaints are more about the vendor than the software: an owner at a mid-market company titled his review "A Good ITSM Product Undermined by Incompetent Billing and Account Management" (G2, August 2026).

Where it falls short: the AI agent is Enterprise-only, which is a quote rather than a price, so the published tiers do not actually get you a resolving agent. Skip it if ServiceNow is already your company standard. See what is Freshservice.

Pricing: Starter $19, Growth $49, Pro $99 per agent a month annual, Enterprise by quote; Freddy AI Copilot $29 per agent on Pro and Enterprise.

Jira Service Management

Atlassian's service desk is free forever for three agents; at the page's own default team size of 75 agents on monthly billing, Standard is $20 and Premium $51.42 per agent a month. Standard and Premium include Rovo AI credits (250 per user a month and 700 respectively), and Premium adds a virtual service agent that answers requests in chat. G2 shows 4.3 from 986 reviews and Gartner 4.4 from 1,229, and Atlassian's own banner claims Leader placement in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for ITSM Platforms.

Where it falls short: the AI agent needs Premium, the credits are exhaustible, and the write actions are Jira-shaped rather than order-shaped. Prices also move with the team-size slider, so check your own band rather than quoting ours.

Pricing: Free forever for 3 agents; Standard $20; Premium $51.42; Enterprise by quote.

Moveworks

Moveworks is not a help desk. It is an AI agent employees message in Slack or Teams, which then resolves requests across the IT and HR systems behind it. ServiceNow completed its acquisition on 15 December 2025, and G2 now lists it as ServiceNow EmployeeWorks at 4.4 from 128 reviews. Its AWS Marketplace listing sells it at $150 per user a year for 1,000 to 2,500 users, which is $150,000 to $375,000 a year at that range.

Where it falls short: it is priced for large companies and there is no self-serve route at all. Under about a thousand employees it is not a realistic option. Our Moveworks guide has more, and Aisera is the closest alternative.

Pricing: not published on the vendor's site; $150 per user a year for 1,000 to 2,500 users on AWS Marketplace.

Which AI agents run on top of these help desks, and what do they cost?

The best-known AI agents in this category are not help desks, and a shortlist that leaves them out is incomplete. Here is what each costs and runs on, checked in September 2026.

Four of those seven will not tell you what they cost, which is worth knowing before three weeks disappear into a sales process. Our guides to Ada, Forethought, Sierra, Decagon and eesel go through each one, and our automation tools comparison prices more of them side by side.

Can you add AI to the help desk you already have?

Switching help desks to get better AI is a migration: tickets, macros, integrations, reporting and retraining. If your help desk works and only the AI falls short, you can add agents on top instead.

Macha is this kind of product, and it is not a help desk, which is why it is out of the ranking and the scorecard above. It runs inside Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom (see the product pages for Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias and Front). Agents start from help desk events such as a new ticket, a customer reply or a status change, and then triage, draft into internal notes, reply, or act in connected tools. Pricing is one plan on monthly ticket volume, from $299 for 750 tickets, about $0.40 a ticket at every tier, one charge per ticket however many replies it takes. It's the done-for-you option among the layers: you connect your help desk and the tools your answers come from, about 15 minutes, and the Macha team analyzes your past tickets, builds the knowledge base and the agent, and runs it in safe mode, with drafts as internal notes, until the drafts are right. That's included on the trial and every plan, and the price covers a dedicated success manager who handles your changes after go-live: new categories, instruction changes, new tools. The trial is $50 of free usage (about 125 tickets) with no card. See the agent-on-your-help-desk page and pricing.

Where it falls short, in the same terms we used above: no independent review base at all, zero G2 reviews as of 22 September 2026 against Zendesk's 7,075; no voice and no social channel; and it runs on customer support help desks only, so an IT team working in an IT service desk such as Jira Service Management or ServiceNow cannot use it. The case for adding a layer over replacing a help desk is in why an AI layer beats rip-and-replace.

Also considered

Named once on the ranking pages but not covered here: ProProfs Help Desk (which wrote one of the ranking lists and puts itself first), HelpDesk.com and SparrowDesk for small customer teams, and Pylon for B2B support, which no longer shows prices on its site. For IT: Risotto (which wrote one of the ranking lists and ranks itself second), Aisera, Glean, Leena AI, ServiceNow and SysAid. Spiceworks Cloud Help Desk scored 13 out of 30 (43%) and failed the rubric: its free Core plan covers 1 to 5 technician seats with unlimited end users and Premium is $5 a seat a month billed annually, but it has no AI agent that resolves anything, which is the axis this page is built on. Voice-first contact centers need a different shortlist altogether.

What should you check before buying an AI help desk?

• Assist or resolve. Drafts and summaries save agent minutes; an AI agent removes whole conversations. Decide which you are buying before comparing prices, and note from our own data that most teams start with the first.
• What the AI is grounded in. Help center only, or also past tickets, internal docs and live order or account data?
• Whose incentive the meter serves. A per-seat price earns the vendor more as you hire and rewards nobody for deflection. A per-resolution meter earns more when the AI closes conversations, which is why the definition of "resolved" is written by the vendor and worth reading twice. Our explainer on what deflection rate really measures is the background reading.
• Handoff. When the AI stops, does the human get a summary and a record of what the AI tried, in the same ticket?
• The second meter. Add the AI charge to the seat price at your real volume, not the headline.
• Testing before launch. Can you run the AI on past tickets or in draft mode first?
• IT-specific: Slack and Teams channels, identity and access integrations, and a CMDB if you manage assets.

How did we research this?

We pulled the live Google results for "ai help desk" and read the ranking lists, the vendor pages and the AI Overview, which names Freshdesk, Zendesk and Help Scout and asks whether the reader means IT or customer support. The shortlist is built from tools named in at least two of those sources plus the previous version of this page. We checked each price on the vendor's own pricing page between 18 and 22 September 2026, used AWS Marketplace for Moveworks, and read G2 and Gartner Peer Insights in a browser for ratings and quotes.

Two figures on this page are not read from the vendor's own site, and both are labeled where they appear: Zoho Desk's dollar prices come from G2's pricing tab because zoho.com serves our location in rupees from a script and from a browser, and Freshservice's dollar prices come from its page as served to a US fetch for the same reason. Front's AI add-on rates were read in a browser and confirmed on its pricing page again on 24 September 2026, when we also rechecked Zendesk, HubSpot, Intercom and Freshdesk. Where a vendor publishes nothing at all (Ada, Forethought, Sierra, Decagon) we say so and give the marketplace or contract-data figure with its publisher named.

We did not build an agent on any help desk here, and we are not quoting benchmark results we did not run. The cost model is arithmetic on published rates at eight agents and 900 resolutions. The first-party numbers are aggregate configuration counts read from our own database on 22 September 2026, with no customer named and no ticket content used.

Macha publishes this page. It is not in the ranking because it is not a help desk, it is not scored because the rubric does not fit it, and the section about it lists a zero on independent reviews and two channels it does not cover.

Frequently asked questions

What is an AI help desk? Help desk software whose AI drafts replies, summarizes tickets, tags and routes them, and in the more capable tools answers requests on its own and hands the rest to a person. For customer support that is a help desk like Zendesk or Help Scout; for IT it is a service desk like Freshservice or Jira Service Management.

What is the top AI help desk software? On our scorecard, Intercom and Gorgias tie at 26 out of 30 and suit opposite teams, with Freshdesk at 24 and Zendesk at 23. By review volume, Zoho Desk (7,947), Zendesk (7,075), Fin (3,912) and Freshdesk (3,771) lead. For a small email team, Help Scout; for IT, Freshservice or Jira Service Management.

Which help desks draft replies and summarize tickets with AI? All of the customer support help desks here do. Help Scout includes drafts and summaries on Standard and Plus at no extra cost; Zendesk charges $50 per agent for Copilot, Freshdesk $29 for Freddy Copilot, and Front $20 for Copilot. Zoho bundles Zia from Professional.

How much does the AI add to the bill? At eight agents and 900 AI resolutions a month, the AI portion alone runs from $378 (HubSpot, in credits) to $1,334 (Zendesk at its $1.50 committed rate), for identical work. Freshdesk is $441, Help Scout $675, Front $801 and Fin $891. Zoho Desk and Jira Service Management bundle theirs into the seat.

How much do AI agents that work with popular help desks cost? Fin is $0.99 per outcome and runs on Zendesk and Salesforce as well as Intercom; eesel is from $299 a month for 500 credits, one per ticket or chat, on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom and Gorgias; Macha is from $299 a month for 750 tickets on Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom, so $299 gets you 750 tickets on Macha and 500 on eesel: $0.40 a ticket against $0.60, with setup done for you by the Macha team and a dedicated success manager included. Ada, Forethought, Sierra and Decagon publish nothing at all.

Is IT help desk being replaced by AI? Parts of it. Password resets, access requests and how-to questions are the requests AI service desks close most often. Hardware, incidents that need judgment and anything touching security stay with people, and the AI needs someone to maintain its knowledge and integrations.

How do I get an AI to help me with support tickets? If you already have a help desk, turn on its built-in AI or add an agent layer, and start it in draft mode on one ticket category. Our own production data says that is where most teams begin: 59 of 119 live agents can write an internal note and only 19 can post a public reply.

Can I use an AI help desk for free? Several have free plans: Jira Service Management is free for three agents, Zoho Desk for three, Help Scout for five users, and Tidio's free plan covers 50 billable conversations a month. Freshdesk gives 500 Freddy AI Agent sessions once per account. Freshdesk itself has no free plan on its pricing page, only a Free program for up to 2 agents that lasts 6 months.

Is there a phone number to call an AI help desk? Not a general one. Phone support by AI is something a company sets up on its own number with a voice agent; if you are trying to reach a specific company's AI, use the number on that company's contact page.

If your team runs Zendesk, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Front, HubSpot or Intercom and you would rather improve its AI than migrate, start a Macha trial. The Macha team builds one agent for your most repetitive ticket category and runs it in safe mode until the drafts are right.

Sources: Zendesk pricing · Zendesk: managing resolution allowances · Zendesk: outcome-based pricing · Freshdesk pricing · Help Scout pricing · Intercom pricing · Fin pricing · Salesforce completes acquisition of Fin · HubSpot Service Hub pricing · Gorgias pricing · Zoho Desk Zia · Front pricing · Tidio pricing · Freshservice pricing · Jira Service Management pricing · Moveworks on AWS Marketplace · ServiceNow completes acquisition of Moveworks · Zendesk completes acquisition of Forethought · forethought.ai/pricing · sierra.ai/blog · eesel.ai/pricing · Spiceworks free cloud help desk · G2: Zendesk · G2: Freshdesk · G2: Help Scout · G2: Fin · G2: Freshservice · Gartner: Zendesk · Gartner: Freshworks · Macha pricing