Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- Which is easier to build an AI agent with: Agent Builder or My AskAI?
- What do I have to do to manage and maintain the AI agents on an ongoing basis?
- How do they compare when it comes to improving their performance over time?
- Can I integrate my new AI agent easily with my existing helpdesk?
- How does human handover work with Agent Builder vs My AskAI?
- How will answer quality compare between the two?
- How flexible and customizable is Agent Builder compared to My AskAI?
- What else can they do?
- Can I self-host my AI customer service agent with either?
- Is Agent Builder cheaper than My AskAI?
- So when should I use Agent Builder instead of My AskAI?
- FAQ
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Oct 8, 2025 10:12 AM
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I’m guessing you have seen the hype around OpenAI’s new Agent Builder product and its promise of allowing you to build an AI customer service agent with AgentKit.
And now you’re wondering: “Is it that easy to build an AI customer service agent with Agent Builder?” and “would this work for my business?”.
So I’ve put together a comparison for you between our AI agent product (My AskAI) and a typical AI customer service agent built using Agent Builder so you can make the right decision for your business.
Spoiler: It’s not for everyone, but may work for you.
Let’s get cracking.
Which is easier to build an AI agent with: Agent Builder or My AskAI?
Agent Builder wasn’t designed with only customer service in mind, it was built as a multi-purpose AI agent building workflow tool.
This means that while you can build an AI customer service agent with it, it necessarily isn’t optimized for it out-of-the-box.
They do, however, have a customer service “template” for you to get set up initially which has some basic flows and guardrails and is a good starting point.
But most of the set-up is down to you, and your only support setting up is via their docs (again, not set up for customer service).
This means you have to do everything from:
- Defining guardrails
- Creating intent classifiers
- Creating knowledge and vector stores
- Building tools and actions
- Writing your own prompts
- Deciding on models you want to use
- Evaluating its performance
- Building your own widget
- + more
For a full run-down of how you would configure your customer service agent with Agent Builder, check out our full guide.
All this can be a positive if you have a team who is well versed with AI and you want maximum configurability and control of your agent.
However, this will also take time.
The initial build and set-up alone will likely take most teams in the region of days to weeks.
On the other hand, My AskAI does most of these things for you:
- Guardrails (including hallucinations) are set and controlled through learnings across all of our clients.
- Intent classification and agent creation is automated.
- We handle creation of vectors stores so you just “click to upload”.
- We have tool, action and task building flows that make it simple to create more complex multi-step flows.
- We write prompts and evaluate models using years of experience, optimizing them across millions of conversations, and iterate upon them constantly through A/B testing.
- We have created integrations with multiple helpdesks and solved for numerous edge-cases based on our experience with clients that means you don’t have to worry about them.
And not only is our AI agent likely far more sophisticated than you would build using the Agent Builder (using multiple proprietary techniques we used to get the optimal answers), but also we are able to take learning from hundreds of clients every day to improve your AI agent’s performance.
This means feedback cycles are a lot quicker and you get the benefit of a far larger ‘test’ set when it comes to new model releases, for example.
And the true benefit of all of the above being done by My AskAI is that all that set-up can be done in minutes by:
- Signing up for an account
- Setting your AI agent live
All done without the need for a development team or any prompting experience.
What do I have to do to manage and maintain the AI agents on an ongoing basis?
Having been in the AI customer service agent space as long as almost any one I can speak from experience here:
An AI customer service agent still needs to be continually managed and maintained.
You can’t just set it up and forget about it.
On an ongoing basis you will need to:
- Manage prompts: Prompts are living things, even if you don’t change the model you are using, models do still change behind the scenes. Even subtle changes can have big impacts on answer quality. And when a new model comes out, you will have to do a lot of regression testing as newer/more powerful doesn’t always mean better and can dramatically change the performance of your AI agent.
- Update knowledge: Uploading static knowledge is fine if your knowledge is always static, but this is rarely the case, so you will need to set up processed to constantly re-crawl or re-index the content to get the latest updates and provide accurate answers.
- Evaluating performance: Set up processes for reviewing your AI agent’s answers, identifying when it is working and when it isn’t but also identifying what it can’t answer and what your customers are regularly asking. This will often require you to make a dedicated dashboard and analytics tool in addition to your agent.
- Implementing new best practice approaches: The world of AI is non-stop, new approaches, process and workflows emerge every week. Keeping track of all the updates can be a full-time job and trying to make sure your AI agent is using the latest and greatest techniques can add to this further.
You may think some of the above are ‘nice-to-have’s but you’ll quickly realize most are necessary and start taking hours out of your week.
However, if you use our AI customer service agent platform, you don’t need to worry about any of this, as it’s our full time job to do it for you!
How do they compare when it comes to improving their performance over time?
There are a several key components to the performance of your AI customer service agent:
- Knowledge availability: does the AI agent have the information available to it to answer the questions, whether that be the static knowledge in help centers or dynamic, customer-specific knowledge? You will need to monitor this and have a process for “fixing” any knowledge gaps you identify - either through creating new documentation or otherwise.
- Prompts: there won’t just be one prompt, there will be multiple, each which can be optimized for its given task, one may be for rewriting a question, one may be for formatting, another for generating the final answer, or not hallucinating. As you see responses and as models change you can improve upon these prompts.
- Models: The right combination of models is key to optimizing performance. Sure, you could use the heavy reasoning models at all stages of your AI agent, but this will mean you will have very slow interactions, not ideal if you use a chat UX (and also very expensive). So you will want to ensure that you are using the optimal models for each step of your flow, balancing between speed and accuracy.
- Behavioral features: There is no one-size-fits-all universal AI agent for customer service. So you will have to tailor it to your specific business and use case. This may involve giving it instructions of how to behave in certain scenarios or setting up specific tasks or agents for others.
When using OpenAI’s Agent Builder, all these features are on you to either create or manage.
While there are basic evaluation tools, you will be responsible for monitoring them and coming up with business processes to implement any improvements.
My AskAI handles all of these for you.
We have a knowledge gap identification feature that gives you a grouped list of all the questions they AI can’t answer, and uses your human agent’s responses to generate proposed new knowledge snippets.
We take away all the hassle of prompt and model management, using our experience, combined with A/B testing to ensure you are getting the best results.
And finally we have already built behavioral features like guidance and tasks so you don’t have to think through them and build out the edge cases.
Can I integrate my new AI agent easily with my existing helpdesk?
Once you have built your AI customer service agent with Agent Builder your next step will be wanting to deploy it somewhere.
If you just want your own simple chat widget then this isn’t such a problem, as you can use AgentKit’s ChatKit to build a chat widget customized to your company’s brand.
But most businesses will already have some form of helpdesk and ticketing system that you will need to integrate with, not least of which so your human team can take over when your AI can’t answer (read on to learn more about human handover later).
So that means you are going to have to look up the API docs of Zendesk (Sunshine conversations), Intercom, HubSpot, Freshdesk or Gorgias (for example) and figure out how they all work and how you are going to integrate your new agent into them.
While not horrendous, this is by no means a trivial exercise and will definitely require a member of your development team to assist and, again, maintain (as they all tend to make updates - sometimes breaking, and don’t always consider 3rd parties when making changes).
If you use My AskAI, all of that burden is taken away from you and put onto us.
We are the ones who then deal with the updates and the multitude of edge cases (and have to become experts in each helpdesk’s APIs in the mean time).
And, this is all done through approved 3rd party apps in the respective helpdesk’s marketplaces, so they have gone through rigorous testing and quality controls already.
How does human handover work with Agent Builder vs My AskAI?
You may be content with your AI customer service agent providing a “Sorry I can’t help” message and ending the conversation if it can’t answer a customer’s question.
But most companies want the conversation handed over or a ticket created at this point so their human team can pick things up.
This is certainly possible with Agent Builder in a number of ways - when it can’t answer you could:
- Share a contact email address
- Share a ticketing form link
- Use a helpdesk API and a tool to create a ticket with the customer’s details
- Fully integrate with your helpdesk chat APIs to continue the conversation in either your or their widgets
The first 2 of these are very simple and just require prompt changes.
The last 2 however will again require you calling on a friendly developer and may end up taking much longer than you had planned.
Most larger businesses need the last of these to ensure responsive customer support.
And this is exactly what you get from day 1 with My AskAI, which allows you to integrate into your existing helpdesk for human handover using an approved 3rd party app.
It means when the AI can’t answer a question, the customer sounds frustrated, or if the customer asks to, the customer can switch to talk to one of your human agents, all within the same chat interface or ticket, seamlessly.
In addition to this you can also set rules or scenarios for the AI agent to handover, like if the customer is complaining or threatening legal action.
How will answer quality compare between the two?
A benefit of using the Agent Builder to create your customer service agent will be that it is highly customized and bespoke to your individual use case.
Now this may mean that there are scenarios you will be able to cater for that aren’t available in My AskAI and therefore could improve your answer quality.
However, these are likely edge cases.
We work on improving answer quality every day as we continually run tests to optimize our responses and have over 2 years experience working on this (as long as anyone in the industry!).
This all results in our AI resolution rate (the % of conversations handled by AI without human input), which currently averages 75% (see our homepage for the last 30 days live).
Combining our knowledge with all the aforementioned tools and features you will have available to improve your responses over time will likely mean that a My AskAI agent will have the edge on answer quality.
How flexible and customizable is Agent Builder compared to My AskAI?
This is one area where Agent Builder will certainly outperform My AskAI.
Agent Builder essentially gives you complete control over the setup of your AI agent from start to finish (more on this in our explainer guide).
But this is only really useful if you have experience building agent tools like these already and know what “good” looks like.
Otherwise, you will likely find yourself experimenting with all sorts of settings and capabilities that you may or may not need.
We are definitely biased but would say that there is some benefit to less control (and less thought) in some circumstances - just defer to the experts!
What else can they do?
In addition to providing an AI customer service agent to auto-respond and answer your customers’ queries, we also have AI copilot tools that you can use to improve your efficiency.
This means, if you aren’t ready to go “full AI” yet you can use features like our “internal notes” mode to answer questions, but only visible to your human agents.
Or, you can generate responses on demand to customer queries that you can edit before sending.
Creating these types of features is possible still with Agent Builder, but you are going to spend a lot more developer time and effort doing it just for your business.
Can I self-host my AI customer service agent with either?
My AskAI does not have a self-host option, so if this is imperative for your use case then we are not the product for you.
Agent Builder does have this as an option though, so would be a good alternative if you need to self-host.
Is Agent Builder cheaper than My AskAI?
This is where things can get quite complicated.
Let’s start with My AskAI - our cheapest plan is $99/mo (or $149/mo when paid monthly) to handle 1,000 conversations or tickets, which equates to $0.10 per ticket.
We do have some additional costs e.g. $0.05 for a tool call or $0.10 for a task (both only when they are used in a ticket), but by and large, that’s everything.
For agent builder you will be paying the raw AI costs, which can be cheaper, but it will depend on which models you end up using.
You could easily end up paying more than you would pay My AskAI if you use more powerful models because your answering pipeline won’t be as effective as ours and so you have to end up using better models or longer prompts/context windows.
Most likely though, you will be paying slightly less for your customer service agent built with AgentKit.
But that isn’t the only cost to consider.
As mentioned throughout this post, building with Agent Builder will mean more work for your team and your developers, and that comes at its own cost.
If you take an average developer cost of even $70/hr, if you have 1,000 tickets/mo or less and they spend more than 1 hour per month maintaining or fixing your AI agent then you will instantly be spending more money than you would with My AskAI.
And if you have more tickets than this, the time they will spend will likely go up (and this is without factoring in your AI costs).
Therefore, all things considered, using Agent Builder over My AskAI is unlikely to result in a saving at all, and may end up costing more.
So when should I use Agent Builder instead of My AskAI?
Thanks for sticking with me!
Now it’s time to tally all of these points up and see how each platform stacks up for creating an AI customer service agent:
ㅤ | Agent Builder by OpenAI | My AskAI | ㅤ |
Ease of build | 4/10 | 8/10 | My AskAI win |
Maintenance/managing | 4/10 | 8/10 | My AskAI win |
Improving | 4/10 | 9/10 | My AskAI win |
Helpdesk integration | 3/10 | 9/10 | My AskAI win |
Answer quality | 6/10 | 8/10 | My AskAI win |
Human handover | 3/10 | 9/10 | My AskAI win |
Flexibility/customization | 9/10 | 5/10 | Agent Builder win |
Other features | 6/10 | 8/10 | My AskAI win |
Self-hosting | 10/10 | 2/10 | Agent Builder win |
Pricing | 8/10 | 8/10 | Tie |
Even with all of this, there are still some companies who would benefit from building an AI customer service agent with Agent Builder, rather than using an off-the-shelf option like My AskAI, especially if they:
- Already have experience and familiarity building AI tools
- Have smaller ticket volumes
- Have a highly custom use case
- Are less cost conscious/resource constrained (development time)
- Don’t require a human handover
- Don’t require a full helpdesk integration
But if this isn’t you, and you are looking for an affordable, plug-in-and-play solution for your existing helpdesk, that is proven across hundreds of clients and millions of tickets, then try My AskAI.
FAQ
Is OpenAI Agent Builder a good fit for customer service out of the box?
It can work, but it’s a general-purpose agent framework - not customer-service–specific. You’ll configure guardrails, intent classification, agents, tools, prompts, models, evaluation, and a widget yourself. My AskAI comes pre-optimized for support with these pieces already built.
How long does it take to stand up an AI support agent with Agent Builder vs My AskAI?
Agent Builder typically takes days to weeks (depending on your team’s experience) to design flows, tools, prompts, and integrations. My AskAI is minutes: create an account, connect your helpdesk, and go live.
What ongoing maintenance will I need?
With Agent Builder you’ll own prompt upkeep, model regressions, knowledge reindexing, analytics/evals, and adopting new best practices. My AskAI handles these centrally (knowledge-gap surfacing, prompt/model tuning, tasks/guidance features), so you don’t need a dedicated team.
How do they compare on helpdesk integration and human handover?
Agent Builder requires you to build and maintain Zendesk/Intercom/HubSpot/Freshdesk/Gorgias API integrations and handover logic. My AskAI already has approved marketplace apps and seamless escalation/handover rules on day one.
Is Agent Builder cheaper than My AskAI?
Sometimes on raw model costs - but total cost often isn’t lower. My AskAI starts at $99/mo ($0.10 per ticket for 1,000 tickets). With Agent Builder you also pay developer time; even ~1 hour/month at ~$70/hr can outstrip savings at low volumes. Powerful models and longer prompts can further raise costs.
