Front AI Answers Was Discontinued — Here's the Better Path

What actually happened to AI Answers

AI Answers is gone as a purchasable product. Front's own help center still hosts the article, but it now opens with a plain deprecation banner. Per Front's AI Answers (legacy) documentation, the notice reads: "AI Answers is no longer available for purchase. Check out Autopilot Resolve to automatically reply to chat messages using AI."

AI Answers was Front's earlier bot, working mostly inside Front Chat to answer customer questions from your knowledge content. Its replacement, Autopilot, is a more capable agent — but the swap is not optional. If you were relying on AI Answers, or you came looking to add it, the only path Front offers now is to migrate to Autopilot as an add-on on the current plan editions.

For a team that had tuned AI Answers to its own inbox, a forced migration is a real cost: new configuration, new billing model, and the uncertainty of whether the new agent behaves the way the old one did. That is the friction people are actually feeling when they search "Front AI Answers" in 2026 and find a dead end. For the fuller picture of Front's AI stack, our Front AI explained breakdown maps every piece.

Where native Front AI genuinely earns its keep

It would be dishonest to treat Front's current AI as a downgrade across the board — in several places it is very good, and if you are on Front already you should use it.

Autopilot is a real agent, not a canned-answer bot. Front positions it around Playbooks: you define a workflow once — a quote request, a scheduling task, a refund check — and Autopilot runs it, collecting missing details from the customer and touching connected systems along the way. Front states that Autopilot "learns from your actual customer conversations and help content, so it works from day one," and that it "learns on the job, using real outcomes from your team to improve how it responds." For a shared-inbox team juggling support, sales, and ops in one place, that workflow-first framing fits Front's collaborative model well.

AI Compose and Copilot speed up the humans. Compose lets a teammate draft, polish, translate, or summarize in a couple of clicks — Front caps it at roughly 200 actions per teammate per day, which is plenty for daily drafting. Copilot surfaces context and suggested replies inside the conversation. Smart QA scores conversations automatically so leads can coach without reading every thread. None of this is filler; it is genuinely useful assistive AI for a busy team.

So the honest read is: Front's native AI is strong at assisting the agent and at running defined workflows. The tension shows up in two places — how it is billed, and what happens on the messy, open-ended questions that do not fit a Playbook.

The billing model, and where deflection stops short of resolution

Front's AI is add-on-priced, and the shape of that pricing matters. According to third-party pricing trackers reviewed in July 2026, Front's base seats run roughly $25 (Starter), $65 (Professional), and $105 (Enterprise) per seat per month billed annually, with Copilot and Smart QA sold as add-ons of around $20 per seat on the lower plans, and Autopilot billed closer to a per-resolved-case model — one tracker cites about $0.89 per resolved case (Chatarmin's 2026 Front pricing breakdown). Treat those as directional third-party figures; Front's own pricing page is the source of record, and our Front pricing explained post keeps the tiers current.

The subtler issue is the difference between deflection and resolution. A per-case-resolved metric sounds like resolution, but much of what any inbox bot does is deflect: it answers what it can from help content, then hands off. The genuinely hard questions — the ones that need this customer's actual order, invoice, or account state — are exactly the ones a knowledge-only agent cannot close. And AI Answers' original weakness is instructive here: an AI that cannot ground itself in your past conversations and live data will confidently miss the cases where the answer lives outside the help center.

This is the seam where a dedicated AI agent layer earns its place — not by replacing Front, but by resolving the conversations native AI can only route or deflect.

The better path: a grounded AI agent layer on top of Front

Macha is an AI agent layer that runs on top of the Front you already use through the Macha–Front connector — it does not replace Front, your shared inboxes, your rules, or Autopilot. You keep everything you have. Macha adds the reasoning-and-resolution layer that a forced Autopilot migration does not automatically give you.

Two things make the difference.

It is grounded, and it shows its work. When a Macha agent answers, it cites the sources it used — a specific help doc, a playbook, a past conversation — so a support lead can see why the agent said what it said. That auditability is precisely what a legacy answer-bot lacked. The category of AI agents for customer service exists to do this reasoning-heavy work that keyword deflection cannot.

(These screenshots show Macha demo-org agents demonstrating the capability. Front is not a connected connector in this demo — they illustrate how a grounded agent answers, not a live Front conversation.)

It reaches your live systems. A grounded answer often needs data that lives outside the help center — an order status, a subscription state, a shipment. A custom tool turns your REST API into something the agent can call mid-conversation, so it can move from "here is the policy" to "here is the status of your order." That is the line between deflection and true resolution.

The division of labour is clean: let Front's Autopilot and Compose do what they are good at — running defined Playbooks and assisting your teammates — and layer Macha's agent on top for the open-ended, data-dependent questions that need grounded reasoning. To wire it up, building an AI agent for Front and connecting Front to Macha to route conversations to AI walk through the mechanics. And on pricing: Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution — automation and reasoning have different costs, and outcomes vary, so it is honest to price the action rather than promise a fixed "resolution."

Migration playbook: from AI Answers to a grounded layer

If AI Answers was doing real work for you, here is a pragmatic path forward.

1. Accept the Autopilot migration for what it is good at. Move your defined, workflow-shaped tasks — quote requests, scheduling, structured intake — onto Autopilot Playbooks. That is squarely its strength.
2. Inventory the questions that never fit a Playbook. The open-ended "where is my order," "why was I charged twice," "does my plan include X" — the ones that need live data. These are the resolution gap.
3. Connect Macha on top of your Front via the connector, and point it at your help content plus your live systems through custom tools.
4. Let sources do the QA. Because Macha cites what it used, you can review and trust its answers before you widen its autonomy — no black-box deflection.
5. Measure resolution, not just deflection. Track how many of the gap questions actually get closed end to end, versus routed and re-opened.

FAQ

Is Front AI Answers discontinued? Yes. Front's help center marks AI Answers as legacy, and the article states it is "no longer available for purchase," directing teams to Autopilot Resolve instead. It is no longer a product you can buy.

What replaced Front AI Answers? Autopilot. It is a more capable AI agent built around Playbooks that can run multi-step workflows and, per Front, learns from your conversations and help content — rather than only answering chat FAQs.

Do I have to migrate to Autopilot? If you want Front's native AI going forward, effectively yes — AI Answers is retired. Autopilot is sold as an add-on on Front's current plan editions. You can also add a grounded AI agent layer on top of Front for the questions Autopilot deflects rather than resolves.

How is a grounded AI agent layer different from Autopilot? Autopilot excels at defined workflows; a grounded layer like Macha focuses on open-ended, data-dependent questions — reading the conversation, pulling live order or account data through custom tools, and answering with explicit sources so you can audit every reply.

Does Macha replace Front? No. Macha connects to Front as a live connector and runs on top of your existing shared inboxes, rules, and Autopilot. It adds the resolution layer; it does not replace the platform you already collaborate in.

Ready to close the gap AI Answers left behind? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.