AI Customer Support Software: The 9 Best Tools for 2025

Years ago, managing a support team meant living in a loop of repetitive questions: “How do I reset my password?” or “Do you have a discount?”

Day after day, my team tackled the same inquiries manually. It wasn’t fun, and it certainly wasn’t efficient.

Then, rule-based automation tools like basic chatbots and troubleshooting surveys came along, enabling customers to self-serve for common issues.

It was a game-changer — until it wasn’t. 

We still found ourselves responding to questions clearly covered in the FAQs. Some customers simply preferred submitting a ticket over searching for answers themselves.

Fast forward to today, and modern AI customer support software is making those challenges a thing of the past.

Today’s customer service AI can handle those repetitive queries. They boost agent productivity by automatically summarizing conversations and ensuring polished grammar. They can also create FAQ pages, analyze customer sentiment, extract actionable insights, and so much more.

But with hundreds of options on the market, choosing the right AI tools for your support team can feel overwhelming. 

In this guide, we’ll explore the most effective AI customer support tools for 2025, key factors to consider when evaluating your options, and tips for seamlessly integrating AI into your support operations.

What is AI customer support software?

AI customer support software refers to a range of tools that leverage artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), and generative AI to enhance, automate, and streamline customer interactions. These tools are designed to improve operating efficiency and the overall customer experience.

Take chatbots, for example. When a customer reaches out with a question, an AI-powered chatbot can use NLP to understand their question and generative AI to retrieve relevant information from the knowledge base and provide an AI-generated response that feels natural and conversational.

Today’s AI bots go far beyond basic answers. They can also:

• Recognize intent and sentiment to tag tickets for in-depth reporting.

• Generate conversation summaries to save agents time.

• Seamlessly escalate complex inquiries to human agents when needed.

Whatever it is your customer service team needs, chances are that AI can help them in some way. Let’s dive into the top AI customer support tools available today.

The 9 best AI tools for customer service teams

The list below includes many different types of software, such as help desks, chatbots, knowledge base solutions, QA tools, and sentiment analysis platforms. 

Basically, there’s something for every support team out there. 

It’s like an AI support tool buffet — just pick what you need! 

1. Help Scout — Best for delivering customer-centric support across channels

If your support team has grown beyond a one-person operation, a tool to help you manage customer conversations is essential for streamlining day-to-day activities. Help Scout offers a comprehensive solution for managing email, social media, live chat, in-app support, and even your help center — all from one centralized platform.

What sets Help Scout apart from other AI-powered help desks is its responsible integration of AI, designed to empower your team to deliver exceptional, customer-centric service.

Here’s exactly how Help Scout’s AI features can improve your customer service:

• With AI summarize, your team can condense lengthy conversations into concise bullet points with just a click. This eliminates the need for time-consuming manual reviews, allowing agents to quickly get up to speed on ongoing issues.

• AI assist gives your agents the tools to fine-tune both replies to customers and knowledge base articles. Use it to adjust the tone of a message, modify its length, fix spelling and grammar, or translate it into another language. 

• Drafting replies from scratch is a thing of the past with AI drafts, which leverages generative AI, past conversations, and your Help Scout Docs content to create draft responses to customer questions. Unlike autonomous bots that can risk sending inaccurate responses, agents can review, edit, and personalize drafts before sending, making this feature ideal for complex support environments.

• Lastly, AI answers is designed to provide clear, simple responses to straightforward customer inquiries. What sets this feature apart is transparency — it’s not a bot disguised as a human. Customers will know that they’re interacting with AI, setting realistic expectations. And if the AI response doesn’t fully resolve their issue, switching to a human agent for further support is easy.

Another nice thing about Help Scout is the price. All Help Scout plans — including the free plan — come with unlimited user seats and access to all AI features. There are also no usage fees associated with the AI features, making it a great choice for those who might otherwise be priced out of AI access.

Pricing: ​​Free trial and plan available. Paid plans start at $50 per month. AI features are included across all plans (including the free plan) at no additional charge.

2. Gorgias — Best for ecommerce brands

If you’re running an ecommerce support team, automating common queries with AI should be a no-brainer. Given how repetitive many ecom customer inquiries can be, AI automation is a perfect solution to boost efficiency and accuracy.

Gorgias is one of the best known ecommerce tools for support teams. Known for its seamless help desk integration with popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce, Gorgias enables support teams to enhance productivity and streamline workflows with a range of AI tools:

• AI bots that respond to common customer questions, reducing response times and freeing up agents for more complex issues.

• Automated ticket prioritization and assignment based on identified ecommerce-specific customer intents.

• Sentiment and ticket theme analysis for advanced reporting.

Gorgias charges based on ticket volume, making it a cost-effective solution for teams with a stable and low ticket volume.

Pricing: Free trial available. Paid plans with AI automation start at $40 per month.

3. Brainfish — Best for knowledge base management

When you find yourself repeatedly answering questions already covered in your knowledge base, it can be a sign that your help center isn’t easy to navigate — or maybe that customers aren’t eager to sift through articles manually.

In cases like this, an AI-powered knowledge base helps by offering a smoother self-service experience with quick, accurate responses based on your existing help center content. 

Unlike traditional AI chatbots, they set realistic expectations — customers know they’re interacting with a system, not a person, so there’s less frustration if the answer doesn’t fully address their question.

Brainfish is a popular AI-powered self-service platform that turns your knowledge base into an intelligent assistant delivering personalized responses tailored to each customer’s question.

It offers an intuitive admin interface and deep insights into customer behavior, helping you fine-tune your support resources. To get started, you can quickly migrate content from popular knowledge base platforms like Notion, Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom. 

If you’re looking to reduce repetitive questions and increase your successful self-service rates, Brainfish might be the solution you’ve been searching for. 

Pricing: Not available to the public — you’ll need to request a custom quote.

4. Fin bot by Intercom — Best for AI-powered live chat

Since ChatGPT and other AI tools went mainstream, I’ve heard a common question from people outside the support world: “Why don’t we just use AI to handle all support inquiries?” 

Sure, that sounds great — until you’ve experienced the frustration of being trapped in an endless loop with a bot that just doesn’t get what you’re saying or lacks the resources to provide a meaningful answer.

That said, not all bots are bad. Intercom’s Fin bot is one example. While it may not always deliver the advertised 99.9% accuracy rate, it does a solid job of tackling repetitive, straightforward questions.

You can connect Fin to a wide variety of resources, including entire websites, files, quick fact snippets, previous customer interactions, and even custom target answers for frequently asked questions. These all make it easier to create a bot that’s genuinely helpful for your specific use case and offers an optimal AI customer experience.

Similar to other solutions, you can fine-tune the bot’s personality to align with your brand voice. It also comes with an interface for analyzing unanswered questions so you can easily identify content gaps and add new resources to improve coverage over time.

Intercom also offers Fin as an AI agent for Zendesk and Salesforce customers, so if you’ve already invested in one of those platforms but aren’t happy with the AI functionality, it may be worth checking out. 

Pricing: $0.99 per resolution. Fin is available as an add-on for any Intercom plan, which starts at $29/user per month.

5. SentiSum — Best for surfacing insights and sentiment analysis

Manually tagging support tickets might work when you only receive a handful each week, but for teams handling hundreds or thousands of conversations, it would be a major waste of time. 

That’s where SentiSum steps in, offering an AI-driven solution to automate insights and help you understand your customers better.

SentiSum’s advanced AI analyzes and applies tags to your support tickets. It also extracts insights from customer feedback without requiring manual effort. SentiSum integrates seamlessly with many help desk platforms and acts as an analytics add-on, allowing you to:

• Understand customer sentiment at scale.

• Pinpoint the reasons customers are contacting support.

• Spot trends in recurring issues.

SentiSum can handle substantial amounts of data, but it can get costly. If you’re a mid-market or enterprise business looking to automate insights and gain a deeper understanding of customer feedback, it’s a solution worth exploring.

Pricing: Free trial available. Plans start at $1000 per month.

6. Balto — Best for customer support call centers

AI support tools aren’t limited to text-based channels; they can also improve your phone support. If your team still offers phone support, integrating AI automation into this process can greatly improve both agent performance and customer experience.

Like many other tools, Balto tracks calls and stores transcripts for future reference, but its capabilities reach beyond that. As agents engage with customers, it listens in on the conversation and helps streamline the process by:

• Displaying key talking points to guide the call and offering helpful phrases and questions when agents need them most.

• Sending notifications to discourage bad habits and ensure agents stay on track with brand guidelines.

• Providing live chat for reps to instantly connect with managers for guidance during critical calls.

• Recognizing negative sentiment and sending heated conversations to managers before they escalate further.

Phone support can be especially stressful for agents, as there’s little room to pause, research, or craft thoughtful responses. Reps must think on their feet while maintaining rapport with the customer.

By providing real-time support, AI tools like Balto empower agents to feel more confident and in control, which is especially helpful for newer team members who may feel nervous about handling calls independently as they start in their roles.

Pricing: Not available to the public. You’ll need to request a custom quote.

7. Convin — Best for AI-powered quality assurance (QA)

As customer expectations for service quality continue to rise, having a robust QA program is becoming essential. While manual QA reviews typically only cover a small subsection of your customer conversations, AI-powered QA tools like Convin enable 100% review coverage.

Convin is one of the pioneers in AI-driven QA reviews, specifically designed for omnichannel support teams. Leveraging advanced conversation intelligence, it records, transcribes, and analyzes customer interactions across multiple channels, including calls, chats, social media, and emails.

Using secure in-house language models, Convin’s AutoQA feature evaluates agent performance across all support interactions based on pre-set criteria, eliminating selection bias and ensuring a balanced evaluation. The software can recognize negative emotions and flag those interactions along with any questionable cases for human review, helping teams identify and address areas for improvement.

Unlike many AI QA tools, Convin fosters a two-way dialogue around QA evaluations: agents can accept scores or appeal evaluations they disagree with, allowing for transparency and constructive feedback between agents and managers.

Pricing: Manual QA features are free, but AutoQA functionality only comes with paid plans (and you’ll need to request a quote).

8. Guru — Best for creating and managing your internal knowledge base

If you’re like me, you’ve probably noticed that information overload is growing year after year. The sheer volume of data out there can be overwhelming, and unless you have a dedicated knowledge management team, keeping up with it all seems impossible.

That’s where AI-powered knowledge management tools, like Guru, come in handy.

Guru can be seamlessly integrated with your tech stack, pulling knowledge from your websites, apps, docs, and chat platforms to provide instant, cited answers. Its AI-driven search takes into account permissions, context, history, roles, and even location to deliver the most relevant information, making it easier to find what you need without sifting through countless resources manually.

While this isn’t necessarily an AI feature, AI answers are only as good as the underlying data, and one of the standout features of Guru is its system for assigning ownership and verification intervals to each piece of knowledge, ensuring that the underlying data remains up to date.

Pricing: Free trial available. Plans start at $15/user per month.

9. Productboard — Best for managing customer feedback

Customer feedback is helpful and can give you a direct line to what will truly benefit your users. But for a small support team, managing a lot of feedback can feel overwhelming.

Productboard integrates with a variety of help desks, surveys, and communication tools to centralize customer insights. These insights can then be linked directly to product areas, features in your roadmap, or items in your backlog to provide a clear view of what improvements or new features will have the biggest impact.

The AI features make the process quick and efficient by identifying and summarizing customer pain points. You can quickly review concise summaries that capture the core of what customers are asking for (instead of reading every back-and-forth conversation).

Feedback is then automatically connected to relevant features or projects in your Productboard.

Productboard’s AI features are relatively new and still require human oversight, but they already deliver significant time savings. With conversation summaries, ensuring each insight is linked to the correct feature or product area becomes much easier compared to handling it all manually.

Pricing: Free trial available. Plans with AI automation start at $59 per month.

Which AI tool is right for your support operations?

Choosing the right AI tool for your customer support team can feel overwhelming given the variety of options available. To make the right decision, start by evaluating three key factors:

• Your support volume.

• Your ticket complexity.

• Your overall goals.

Support conversation volume

If you’re managing a high-volume team handling thousands of requests each day, even small efficiency gains can have a significant impact. In this case, look for tools that help scale operations while maintaining quality:

• Chatbots for deflecting common repetitive queries and reducing the number of tickets requiring agent intervention.

• Automated QA tools to help maintain quality while saving on costs. With a high volume of tickets, manual QA reviews can become costly and time-consuming.

• AI-powered reporting software that can analyze large volumes of data, uncover patterns, and generate valuable insights for data-driven decisions. Instead of manually sorting through tons of customer feedback, AI-powered VoC tools can categorize and process this data, saving thousands of hours for your team.

On the flip side, if you’re working with lower ticket volume, investing in AI for customer service volume automation may not yield as much value. For smaller teams, automated tagging or AI-powered QA reviews may not be necessary as the volume may not justify the investment. Instead, look at solutions that help your small team increase efficiency as you scale:

• AI help desks streamline ticket management and customer queries, giving agents more time to focus on complex issues.

• AI knowledge base solutions can help your agents quickly access and generate documentation making the support process more efficient.

Ticket complexity

The complexity of the support requests your team handles should also influence your choice of AI tools.

If your team deals with intricate, case-specific issues (e.g., debugging or custom engineering solutions), conversational AI chatbots may not be the right fit — they still struggle with tickets that require a deep understanding of logs, customer use cases, or creative problem-solving. Instead, look for AI tools that enhance the capabilities of your agents:

• Internal workflow automation tools to streamline processes like ticket routing.

• AI assistants for tone and grammar corrections.

• AI-powered documentation software to generate detailed guides and articles based on support tickets or bullet points.

If your team handles simpler queries — like many ecommerce brands, for instance — then AI tools designed to empower self-service will be of great help. This includes:

• Chatbots for automating responses to common questions.

• AI knowledge bases that can return results based on search intent rather than just keywords, allowing customers to resolve common queries on their own.

Key customer experience objectives

Finally, what are you trying to achieve with AI? Your goals will help determine which tools are the best fit for your team:

• If your goal is to keep up with the high volume of tickets and reduce the load on your support team, AI-powered knowledge bases, chatbots, and self-service solutions can help deflect tickets by enabling customers to find solutions on their own.

• If you’re focused on providing a personalized, high-touch customer experience, look for tools that empower your agents. Automated internal workflows, conversation summaries, and AI-driven assistance can free up your agents’ time so they can focus on providing exceptional support.

While all the tools listed above may seem tempting, your current situation and top goals will guide where to start implementing AI in your support team.

How to implement AI software for your customer support team (and not fail)

AI has the potential to transform support operations and make your customer service more efficient, scalable, and customer-friendly. But without the right approach, your efforts might fall short. Here are five actionable tips to help ensure a successful AI launch:

1. Engage your security team early. AI tools usually have access to sensitive company and customer data. To protect your organization from potential risks, you want to ensure the software you choose aligns with internal policies and data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

2. ​​Test before you commit. Not all AI tools perform equally in every context. While a solution may look impressive in sales demos, its real-world functionality might not align with your use case or may perform poorly with your knowledge base content. Testing ensures you invest in solutions that genuinely add value.

3. Address employee concerns proactively. Introducing AI can spark anxiety among your frontline agents, who may worry about job security or changes to their roles. Be proactive in communicating how AI will support — not replace — the team by handling repetitive tasks and freeing agents to focus on higher-value interactions. Transparency and training can go a long way in ensuring a smooth transition and maintaining morale.

4. Optimize your knowledge base. The effectiveness of conversational AI depends heavily on the quality of the data it’s trained on. A well-maintained, robust knowledge base is critical for your AI agents to succeed:

   • Keep docs concise, focused, and structured with direct, straightforward information.

   • Ensure every article is focused on one specific topic. 

   • Write articles around specific user questions, like “How do I reset my password?” rather than burying those password reset steps in a larger Account Settings guide.

   • Regularly audit and update the knowledge base to reflect current processes and solutions.

5. Give it time to learn. AI tools need a calibration period to deliver optimal results. Don’t expect perfection out of the gate. In most cases, it takes at least a few weeks for AI agents to fine-tune their performances, from generating draft responses to aligning with your desired QA standards. During this time, actively monitor, train, provide feedback, and adjust settings based on what’s working and what’s not.

The key to remarkable customer support

Implementing customer support AI software doesn’t mean replacing your human agents with AI — it means using AI to enhance and support your team.

As you explore AI solutions, focus on ways to streamline internal workflows and reduce the burden of repetitive tasks. Human connection still remains at the heart of a great customer experience, and AI can free up your team to focus on making those connections happen. 

Whether it’s through smarter workflows or AI-assisted customer interactions, Help Scout is designed to support your team without losing the personal connection your customers value. Sign up for a free trial of Help Scout and explore our newest AI features today!