AI help desk

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here, and it’s pretty awesome.

For years, science fiction movies told us to fear it. But now that we understand AI is a tool that can add superpowers to almost anything it touches, we’re on board. And so are consumers—according to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 73 percent of them expect more interactions with AI.

Businesses should take note, as AI can improve the customer experience (CX)—that’s where AI help desk software comes in. Follow our guide to learn about the best AI help desks for 2024, including features, capabilities, and pricing. But first, let’s learn the basics of AI help desks.

More in this guide

• What is an artificial intelligence help desk?
• AI help desk comparison chart
• The 9 best AI service desk software
• AI service desk software features
• Benefits of AI help desk software
• How to choose the right AI service desk
• Frequently asked questions
• Try AI help desk software for free

An AI help desk, or AI service desk, uses artificial intelligence technologies to enhance the capabilities of IT service management (ITSM) and customer support teams. It helps enhance efficiency, productivity, and the customer experience.

Our comparison chart highlights important information about AI help desk software. Take a look to learn about the starting price, free trials, and key features of the top AI help desks.

Our deep dive into the top AI help desk software starts here. Pore over your options for 2024 and beyond.

1. Zendesk

Zendesk offers an intuitive, easy-to-use AI help desk solution for IT and customer support teams. Zendesk AI fuels help desk software, infusing AI-powered tools into the Zendesk Agent Workspace, a unified omnichannel support interface.

Zendesk AI is still young, but it isn’t the new kid on the block. Many of our customers already use our AI for customer service to enhance customer service and increase agent productivity and efficiency. Zendesk AI was built on billions of real customer service interactions, so it understands CX. It sets up instantly and is accessible to anyone—no need for developers, heavy IT spending, or months of lead time.

Here are a few AI-powered tools from Zendesk:

• AI-powered chatbots: Advanced bots leverage an extensive database of customer intents specific to CX teams in your industry for more personalized and accurate responses.
• Generative AI for agents: Instantly generate content with intelligent features like Summarize, which creates ticket summaries; Expand, which composes a full messaging reply based on a few words; and Tone Shift, which adjusts your tone to sound more friendly or formal.
• AI-powered knowledge management: AI analyzes the performance of knowledge base articles and suggests updates or new articles to fill content gaps.
• Intelligent routing and triage: This feature detects customer intent, language, and sentiment to classify and route incoming requests from the ticketing system to the best agent.
• Reporting and analytics: This allows management teams to understand internal and external customer needs so they can identify improvement opportunities.
• Intelligence in the context panel: An agent-facing panel in the Agent Workspace guides agents on how best to solve customer issues in real time.

Zendesk service desk software was designed with agents in mind and built for the customer experience. Its intuitive interface makes it easy for agents to use from day one. That means a fast time to value, a better ROI, and a low total cost of ownership.

Features:

• AI-powered chatbots
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Intent and sentiment analysis
• Generative AI for agents, knowledge, and bots
• Macro suggestions for admins
• Intelligence in the context panel for agents

Pricing:

• Suite Team: $55 per agent/month
• Suite Growth: $89 per agent/month
• Suite Professional: $115 per agent/month
• Suite Enterprise: Contact sales
• Suite Enterprise Plus: Contact sales
• Advanced AI (add-on): $50 per agent/month
  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

2. Freshdesk

Freshworks offers a customer service help desk called Freshdesk, which features tools to help support teams manage, prioritize, and resolve customer requests from a single workspace. Freshdesk also offers AI-powered tools that users can add to their help desk, like chatbots that interact with website visitors. These bots provide conversational support and self-service options to customers while assisting with internal processes, like agent onboarding.

Though Freshdesk’s chatbots can answer customer questions using knowledge base content, the software’s AI may not be able to automate the knowledge management process. Businesses may have to identify content gaps, update outdated information, or create new content manually. That means spending more time and resources on tedious and repetitive tasks.

Features:

• Chatbots
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Sentiment analysis
• Social media support
• Predictive analysis

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per agent/month (up to 10 agents)
• Growth: $15 per agent/month
• Pro: $49 per agent/month
• Enterprise: $79 per agent/month
• Freshbots (add-on): $100 for 1,000 bot sessions
  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

3. Help Scout

Help Scout is a customer support platform with features that include a shared inbox, live chat, and knowledge base software. Users can manage all customer interactions from the shared inbox with the help of collaboration and automation tools. Agents can assign teammates to customer requests and get real-time alerts when more than one person is viewing or working on the same inquiry.

Help Scout added AI features to its customer service help desk, including AI Summarize and AI Assist. AI Summarize gives users a recap of the information in email threads, while AI Assist lets agents adjust the tone of their written responses to be professional or friendly. AI Assist also uses generative AI to adjust the length of messages.

Features:

• Chatbots
• Reporting and analytics
• AI Summarize
• AI assist
• Self-service
• Shared inbox

Pricing:

• Standard: $20 per user/month
• Plus: $40 per user/month
• Pro: $65 per user/month
• Help Scout for Startups: 6 months free
  *Plans are billed annually

Free trial:

4. Kustomer

Kustomer is a CRM and customer service platform that can enable teams to provide omnichannel support. It offers communication channels like email, voice, SMS, chat, and web forms. It also has social messaging capabilities that allow users to respond to social media comments or direct messages from the Kustomer Timeline view.

Its AI product, Kustomer IQ, uses AI and machine learning to add intelligence to the platform. It can automatically tag and route tickets to agents based on customer input and recommend actions to agents based on interaction history. Users can deploy its CRM-powered chatbots (bots connected to Kustomer’s CRM data) across chat widgets, social, and messaging tools to provide support and surface knowledge base content to customers.

Features:

• Chatbots
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Sentiment analysis
• Intent detection
• Pre-built templates

Pricing:

• Enterprise: $89 per user/month
• Ultimate: $139 per user/month

Free trial:

5. Intercom

Intercom is an AI-powered IT service desk for customer service that connects a shared inbox, ticketing system, and help center. Its AI-assisted inbox helps summarize ticket information; expand, rephrase, and adjust the tone of user responses; and route requests to the appropriate agent.

Its AI chatbot, Fin, uses knowledge base content to provide automated answers and transfer escalated problems to human agents. Fin’s conversations are documented in the shared inbox, allowing users to monitor the interactions. Admins can also create custom answers for Fin to surface to customers.

Features:

• Chatbots
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• AI assist
• Shared inbox
• Intercom Messenger

Pricing:

• Essential: $39 per seat/month
• Advanced: $99 per seat/month
• Expert: $139 per seat/month
  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

6. Tidio

Tidio’s AI help desk can help businesses provide customer service by blending conversational AI and human support. Lyro AI is Tidio’s conversational AI chatbot that answers frequently asked questions. It learns from support content, remembers previous interactions, and understands context and intent to generate appropriate responses.

Smart Views and Tracker (an upcoming feature) are additional AI tools from Tidio. Smart Views analyzes customer requests, identifies their intent, and prioritizes them accordingly in the queue, while Tracker will rate the requests based on intent and satisfaction. Finally, Tidio’s Reply Assistant feature uses GPT-3.5 to generate responses with a professional tone.

Features:

• Chatbots
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Chatbot triggers
• Prewritten responses
• Lyro (add-on)

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (3 seats)
• Starter: $29 per month (3 seats)
• Communicator: $25 per seat/month
• Chatbots: $29 per month (3 seats)
• Tidio+: Starts at $394 per month
• Lyro: Starts at $39 per month

Free trial:

7. Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is an AI service desk that enables agents to provide omnichannel support with the help of AI. Zoho’s AI-powered assistant, Zia, provides chat support to customers using knowledge base information. Zia also identifies topics that users need to update and remove, and alerts content management teams to make the changes.

Additionally, Zia can identify customer sentiment and intent of incoming customer requests and add them to the ticket. It automatically routes tickets and tags the appropriate agent to handle them. Zia can also make grammar suggestions using machine learning techniques to analyze the context of each sentence.

Features:

• Chatbots
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Sentiment analysis
• Auto-tag tickets

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (for 3 users)
• Express: $7 per user/month
• Standard: $14 per user/month
• Professional: $23 per user/month
• Enterprise: $40 per user/month
  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

8. HubSpot AI

In addition to its marketing and sales tools, HubSpot extended its AI technology to its customer service software. HubSpot’s AI help desk allows customer service agents to create content and automate workflows. It also has AI chatbots that use GPT models to generate replies.

The AI-powered content assistance tools help agents draft email replies. They can also generate website copy and social media posts. With HubSpot AI’s website builder, dev teams can enter prompts and generate a single-page website.

Features:

• Chatbots
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Generative AI
• Customer feedback surveys

Pricing:

• Free: $0 per month (for up to 5 users)
• Starter: $18 per month (for up to 2 users)
• Professional: $450 per month (for up to 5 users)
• Enterprise: $1,200 per month (for up to 10 users)

Free trial:

9. Aisera

Aisera’s service desk offers AI for IT support. Its AI tools include AI Copilot, a chatbot that uses large language models (LLMs) and GPT technology to generate human-like conversations. Users can deploy Aisera’s Universal Bot to handle specific use cases, including HR, marketing, sales, IT, legal, facilities, procurement, and supply chain.

Aisera features a generative AI tool that can summarize tickets, create answers to internal customer queries, and send links. Aisera also provides 3,000 pre-built and third-party workflows to help manage IT help desk requests.

Features:

• Chatbots
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics
• Sentiment analysis
• Self-service automation

Pricing:

• Contact Aisera

Free trial:

With the right features, your AI help desk can make it easy for agents to deliver the best CX. Here are some key features to look for in an AI service desk.

Chatbots for business

Chatbots can do more than just handle repetitive tasks and answer common questions. They use machine learning and natural language processing to understand intent, enabling them to generate accurate, personalized responses. Some come pre-trained on an extensive database of intents, which eliminates manual training and configuration.

Chatbots can provide customers and employees with relevant information and help them troubleshoot issues without human assistance. Generative AI bots use information from the knowledge base to provide the right responses and content. With advanced software, like Zendesk, you can even adjust the chatbot persona to make it friendly, formal, or playful to maintain consistency.

Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis features can detect how customers or employees feel during conversations. This information enables IT and CX agents to understand how to best handle the situation and adjust their tone, which is especially beneficial when dealing with angry customers. Understanding sentiment also helps ensure agents are prepared for the interaction and approach the situation appropriately.

Intelligent routing

With routing and intelligence features in your AI help desk, you can automatically send the IT ticket or customer support request to the best-suited agent to handle it.

Intelligent triage can identify the intent, sentiment, and language of the incoming customer or IT service request and add this critical context to the ticket. Intelligent routing finds the right agent based on skill, availability, and capacity, streamlining the routing process and eliminating manual work.

AI-powered knowledge management

AI help desks can also manage, accelerate, and streamline knowledge base content. For example, Zendesk AI features AI-powered tools that recommend relevant articles inside support tickets and identify trending topics found in requests.

AI can also flag outdated content, suggest new content to fill gaps in your knowledge base, and generate articles. Additionally, it can note high-performing articles and surface inaccurate content with Content Cues.

Reporting and analytics

Robust reporting and analytics tools can provide valuable insights to management, allowing them to make data-driven decisions. AI can quickly analyze massive amounts of data to find patterns among customer and employee tickets, feedback, and operational processes so businesses can make improvements or reallocate resources. It can also use machine learning to predict issues, which enables teams to make proactive and preventative adjustments.

AI help desks offer several benefits for employees and customers. Here are a few benefits AI help desks can provide for IT and customer support teams alike.

Provide personalized and proactive support

AI help desks can leverage machine learning models to understand intent and use customer and employee data to understand individual preferences and needs. Paired with LLM models that use generative AI (think ChatGPT), bots can carry on natural conversations with end users, offering personalized responses and recommendations.

Increase agent productivity and efficiency

Adding AI-powered features to your help desk can streamline workflows and boost the skills of your IT and support teams, increasing productivity and efficiency.

Intelligent routing and triage expedite the process of categorizing and routing ticket requests, so agents can focus on resolving issues instead of sorting them. Artificial intelligence in the agent workspace can offer ticket summaries and assistance—like suggested replies, tone shifts, and recommendations on the next course of action—enabling agents to resolve issues faster and more effectively.

Reduce operational costs

AI help desks can reduce operational costs by automating tedious, time-consuming tasks that agents would otherwise need to handle manually. With AI-powered features like advanced bots to handle common issues and intelligent routing to automatically classify tickets, you can address the same amount of requests without increasing headcount.

AI can also onboard agents faster, reducing costly training time. Businesses can use AI to create AI-powered bots that guide new hires through the training process. AI can also accelerate learning by generating personalized training programs for new employees.

Improve scalability

The right AI help desk software can enable your support team to scale. With features like AI-powered chatbots that offer 24/7 support and intelligent routing that streamlines workflows, you can manage more requests without adding headcount.

Additionally, AI-powered knowledge management tools help businesses scale their help centers by streamlining content creation. That includes creating new content, updating existing content, and identifying content gaps in the knowledge base.

Leverage predictive analytics

AI help desks use predictive analytics to identify trends, anticipate potential issues, and produce data-driven recommendations. Business leaders can use this information to make proactive decisions that prevent problems before they arise.

Support teams can identify trends with customer tickets, feedback, or social listening to get ahead of issues. Management can also use analytics to spot signs of agent burnout or dissatisfaction and address the issue before it leads to employee turnover.

Because AI is a newer technology, businesses may need help understanding which AI tools fit their needs. Here are some important things to consider when picking an AI service desk so the software aligns with your business goals and meets your requirements.

Ease of use

AI technology should enhance the capabilities, skills, and roles of your IT and support teams, not complicate them. Ensure the AI help desk software has an intuitive interface, so your IT and support teams can navigate and manage the solution without too much training.

The AI help desk should also allow you to easily customize workflows, generate responses, and manage knowledge base content. It should also seamlessly integrate with your existing IT systems and support tools, as well as third-party apps to boost functionality.

Data security and compliance

Data security and privacy are crucial to the customer and employee experience—and business leaders know it. According to a Zendesk survey, 63 percent of IT leaders are continuously strengthening their cybersecurity and data privacy measures.

The AI help desk you choose should comply with data security and privacy regulations. The vendor should also regularly update the software’s security features to stay ahead of threats or cyberattacks. It should also offer granular access controls, so you can restrict access to sensitive information and personal data.

Free trial

It’s important to try new software before you buy it to make sure it meets your business needs and objectives. Look for AI help desk software that offers a free trial or demo so you can evaluate the features and functionalities that are crucial to IT and customer support. Gather feedback from your teams throughout the trial period to ensure it aligns with their requirements, preferences, and goals.

Fast time to value and low total cost of ownership

An AI help desk that deploys quickly means that your IT and support teams can use it sooner rather than later. Fast deployment with easy-to-use software results in a fast time to value and can help your business see a quicker ROI.

The cost of software is more than the subscription price. Evaluate the total cost of ownership—including the licensing fees, ongoing maintenance, additional training, and any hidden costs. An AI help desk that doesn’t meet your business needs can lead to unexpected switching costs, but the right solution can provide cost savings, improved productivity and efficiency, reduced employee turnover, and higher customer satisfaction (CSAT).

Support and partnership

When vendors provide quality support, they’re helping you provide better service. That entails delivering exceptional technical support, helping you get the most out of the software, sending educational resources, and offering a community that fosters collaboration and learning.

For example, Zendesk builds relationships and creates long-term partnerships with customers. With guidance from thought leaders and a rich community of founders and CX experts, Zendesk empowers customers to learn best practices, grow their network, and enhance their business strategies. This high-quality, personalized support helps each customer get the most out of their Zendesk customer service software, now and in the future.