Zendesk AI vs Intercom Fin AI agent: Features, Pricing and Results (2025)

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Oct 15, 2025 11:04 AM

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Mike Heap

Ecomm?

‘AI’ has been in Zendesk and Intercom for ages, what’s new?

If you’ve been an Intercom or Zendesk user for a few years, you’ll know this isn’t their first attempts at “AI”.

Both Zendesk and Intercom have offered “AI” features before: Zendesk through their Answer Bot, and Intercom through Resolution Bot (renamed from Answer Bot when Zendesk submitted a trademark dispute…).

Logos of Zendesk and Intercom’s first forays into AI with their Answer bot and Resolution bots respectively.

What’s different now is the addition of Generative AI, enabling their new AI agents to autonomously reply in full, searching your knowledge base, reasoning, and perform actions through flows.

In short, they are much more intelligent, capable and more akin to the experience you are probably used to now from using products like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini.

Zendesk has a a couple of ways it has introduced their AI agents into its helpdesk:

AI Agents Essentials

Advanced AI Agents

Intercom, on the other hand, introduced its AI agent, Fin AI, to their helpdesk in 2023.

Zendesk’s AI Agents Essentials product is very much a “light” version of their full Advanced AI Agents product, so for the purposes of this comparison (and to try and make it a fairer fight) I will be focusing the comparison on Zendesk’s Advanced AI Agents vs Intercom Fin.

How does an AI customer service agent work in Zendesk and Intercom?

Principally, all AI customer service AI agents, whether for Intercom or Zendesk, will work in a similar way:

Train the AI agent with your company or product knowledge.

Turn it on - replying to customers (generally as a ‘tier 1’ agent).

If the AI can’t answer, or if the customer wants to speak to a person, it will hand over the conversation (or ticket) to a human agent to respond so the customer can get the support they need.

That is the 10,000ft explanation.

There are, however, many variations on how all of that is done and how you can make the agents ‘smarter’.

What are the different ways I can use my AI agent in my Intercom and Zendesk helpdesks?

Both vendors give you multiple modes to use their AI:

Direct replies

The main way people will use their AI agents is to directly reply to customers within the chat, conversation or ticket itself.

Zendesk calls these “AI Agent responses”, Intercom simply labels them Fin replies.

A screenshot of the Fin AI chat widget with the Fin AI agent asking “Hi Sara, how can I help?” and the reply from the customer saying “What’s the main difference between my current PayVona plan and the Pro plan?”

But they aren’t the only way you can use your AI agent.

Copilot replies

Agents (your human agents) can click a button to have the AI draft a reply that they can edit.

Both Zendesk and Intercom offer their copilots as a paid add-on.

For the Intercom Fin Copilot this is $35 per agent per month and $50 per agent per month for the equivalent Zendesk offering.

A screenshot of Zendesk’s copilot auto-assist feature in action.

As well as generating draft replies to questions, Zendesk’s AI copilot can also: summarize incoming tickets, enhance the writing of the agent, and categorize and tag tickets using Intelligent triage.

In addition to using help center and knowledge base articles, the Fin AI copilot can also search through your past conversations to generate a response and then let you adjust the tone of voice, formality, language or length.

Voice

Both also offer voice support so you can have an AI agent answering calls 24/7 for you, using the same knowledge you trained you chat or ticket agent on.

They’ll both transfer calls to a human when the AI is unable to help too.

Which is easier to set up?

While Zendesk makes it very simple to enable their Essentials AI agent (a few clicks and you’re up and running), their Advanced AI plan is more involved: you need to contact a Zendesk rep to enable it on your account

Once you’ve done this then you start adding your knowledge sources (website, help center), writing instructions for your AI to follow and (optionally) build flows using Zendesk’s dialogue builder.

This can mean it isn’t the easiest product to set up and we have heard on calls prospects say it “required an engineering qualification” to set up correctly.

A post from Reddit titled “Zendesk & AI agents - After thought?” which states (as part of a longer post): “And using Zendesk’s AI Agents for Messaging, creating a custom answer flow is the most annoying interface in the world.”

Intercom Fin is very easy to turn on if you want to train on your existing Intercom help center or website.

After enabling it, however, some users find the rich feature set overwhelming and the legacy Intercom UI makes features harder to find.

Overall though, I’d say Intercom Fin is far easier and more intuitive to set-up than Zendesk equivalent offering.

How do they differ in what they can be trained on?

‘Static’ content

The first thing you need to do with an AI customer service agent (much like with a human) is train it - give it the information and content so it can answer questions.

You’ll want that training to be as easy as possible, so ideally, your AI agent will be able to pull knowledge from your existing sources.

Let’s see how Zendesk AI and Fin AI compare for ‘static’ content, here’s what they can be trained on:

Knowledge source	Zendesk AI	Intercom Fin AI
Zendesk help articles	✅	✅
Intercom help articles	🟧 website crawl	✅
Freshdesk help articles	✅	✅
Websites (crawl)	✅	✅
Salesforce	✅	❌
Notion	❌	🟧 copilot only
Confluence	❌	🟧 copilot only
Guru	–	🟧 copilot only
Shopify	❌	🟧 via MCP connectors
Google Drive	❌	❌
SharePoint	❌	❌
Dropbox	❌	❌

Zendesk’s AI agent currently supports a handful of help center platforms, Salesforce and general website crawling (but notably, doesn’t have an Intercom integration!).

Fin AI doesn’t natively integrate to Saleforce as a knowledge source, but does allow access to Notion, Confluence and Guru in Copilot mode.

Neither product currently connects natively to file repositories like Google Drive or Dropbox; so if you want to use these sources it will require some manual copy‑and‑paste or custom API work.

‘Dynamic’ content

Where Intercom’s Fin stands apart from most AI customer service agents on the market today is its ability to connect to dynamic data sources via its “Actions” and “Data Connector” features.

These utilize MCPs to enable connections to almost any service.

A screenshot demonstrating Fin AI’s actions allowing the customer to get their order information from Shopify.

In Fin’s own words (lightly edited for readability…):

“Fin integrates with dynamic data sources through features called Data connectors and MCP connectors. These allow Fin to connect to any external system that has an API, including custom internal tools or third-party platforms like Shopify, Salesforce, Stripe, and Jira. You can set up these integrations to let Fin access real-time information, retrieve customer-specific data, or even perform actions in those systems. Data connectors support both JSON and XML responses, and you can configure them to pass dynamic attributes or transform data as needed. MCP connectors further expand these capabilities, enabling Fin to interact with a wide range of business tools for more complete and efficient customer resolutions”

That is all to say - you could technically connect your Fin AI agent to pretty much anything in your company that you can expose via API.

Zendesk’s AI have managed to bring over a similar feature from Ultimate (the acquisition that forms the base of their AI tech) into their AI agent called the “Integrations Builder”.

Their Integrations Builder lets you connect their AI agent to any API or data source, without code, allowing the Zendesk AI agent to do things like: access customer information from back office systems, retrieve data from other external data sources, or interact with third-party applications, all without requiring a single line of code.

While not set up with the latest MCP architecture used by Intercom, it is definitely an impressive capability that allows for a whole host of different actions from the AI agent.

A screenshot of Zendesk AI’s agent widget with a request to return a customer order an a caption showing the AI agent chain of thought of: Search knowledge, Retrieve order details, Verify order eligible for return, Verify item selection for return.

However, you should note that in both cases, you’ll likely need a developer for anything beyond the built‑in Shopify and Stripe connectors.

Which has better answer quality?

There isn’t a perfect, independent way to measure AI answer quality, it can only truly be done by testing with your own data.

But there are a few real-world stats we can look to:

Fin AI publishes on their site that they had resolved over 36 million conversations with a last 30‑day resolution rate of 65% as of July 2025.

A screenshot from Fin AI’s website showing their total resolved conversations (36,088,817) along with a chart showing their climbing average resolution rate each month, peaking at 65% in Jul 2025.

Zendesk does not publish similar resolution data but they do quote (in a number of places) that AI resolutions are “up to 80%” (a number Ultimate consistently quoted prior to their acquisition), along with some case studies where they quote rates between 39% and 66%.

They also talk about the “road to automation” (AI resolution) as being:

The first 30% from generative AI knowledge-based answers

Up to 40% when adding conversation flows

Up to 50% when adding back end customer data

Up to 60% when doing regular QA in addition

And finally reaching 80% through responding to new use cases, in new languages

At the end of the day though, the only way you can really get a feel for answer quality is by testing out for yourself and seeing which you prefer; sometimes it just comes down to preference!

Which AI agent is easier to improve over time?

Training your AI agent is only the start; you need to monitor gaps and update knowledge bases to improve AI resolution.

Here’s how the improvement tooling compares for them both:

Improvement feature	Zendesk AI	Intercom Fin AI
Resolution rate	✅	✅
Knowledge gap identification	✅	✅
A/B testing	✅	❌
AI CSAT / CX score	❌	✅
Learn from historic tickets	❌	✅
Batch testing	❌	✅
Content performance analytics	❌	✅
Inspect answers	❌	✅
Content optimization	❌	✅
Optimize dashboard	❌	✅
AI‑generated articles	❌	✅

As you can see Zendesk’s Advanced AI improvement features are seriously lagging in comparison to Intercom’s Fin.

Aside from basic (core) stats on resolution rate, and knowledge gaps, the only feature they have that Fin doesn’t is an A/B answer testing feature, likely of limited use for most companies without very large ticket volumes (and even then, efforts are often better spent elsewhere).

Zendesk’s Advanced AI agent focuses on highly quantitative charts and statistics showing resolution rates by channel, language or by AI agent, along with overall trends across many, many charts.

Screenshots of AI agent dashboard in Zendesk showing the automated resolution usage trend over time.

This means you will have excellent reporting data to share internally, however, what it lacks is the actionable “how do I fix this?” part of the process.

You will be able to see exactly where performance is lacking, but won’t necessarily know “why”, and so it is left to you to figure out what can be done.

From Zendesk’s documentation, it is not clear whether you can even dig in to review and understand which conversations or tickets resulted in a human handover.

Fin on the other hand provides numerous ways of analyzing their AI agent’s performance, adding custom answers, testing answers on historic tickets before they go live, understanding why the AI answered in the way it did and even auto-suggesting new articles or updates to existing articles for you.

Also, Fin’s Optimize Dashboard can be useful for super detailed debugging.

A screenshot of the Fin AI agent Optimize Dashboard with funnel charts.

This means that even if they are initially trained on similar knowledge, you’re likely to get much faster improvements to your AI resolution rate with Intercom Fin.

Which has more features?

When it comes to breadth of features, both agents are powerful.

Zendesk’s Advanced AI agent features are narrower but probably consider more edge cases and some very large Enterprise requirements (think granular access rights/user roles, customizations and dialogue (flow) builders).

Intercom are at a unique point in history where they are able to move like a startup, despite being a unicorn ($1bn+ company).

This has meant they are able to be truly innovative and first-to-market with a lot of features in their Fin AI agent.

The table below summarizes their major capabilities:

Feature	Zendesk AI	Intercom Fin AI
AI direct replies (chat/email)	✅	✅
AI Copilot / suggested replies	✅ (paid add‑on)	✅ (paid add‑on)
Supported channels	Chat, email, messaging, voice	Chat, email, API, WhatsApp, Messenger, voice
Train on help center	✅	✅
Train on website	✅	✅
Train on internal knowledge sources	❌	🟧 (Copilot only)
Image input	❌	✅
Multilingual	✅	✅
Human handover	✅	✅
Personalized user data responses	✅	✅
Actions / tools	✅	✅
Guidance / system instructions	✅	✅
Procedures / tasks (multi‑step)	🟧 dialogue builder flows	✅
AI CSAT	❌	✅
Conversation monitoring	✅	✅
Insights / analytics	✅	✅
Knowledge gap identification	❌	✅
Answer inspection	❌	✅
Batch testing	❌	✅
A/B testing	✅	❌
Audience testing	❌	✅
AI tagging	✅	✅
AI translations	✅	🟧 Incoming only, outgoing via copilot
Slack	❌	✅
Teams integration	❌	❌
API	❌	✅

So Fin AI has the edge on additional advanced features, like voice support and image inputs, whereas Zendesk AI has a few more in-depth configuration set-up features.

One of the more powerful features of Intercom Fin is the feature that allows the completion of complex, multi-step processes.

Think things like: transaction disputes, account updates and refunds, where you need a combination of decisions, data collection, lookups and actions.

Fin AI uses “Procedures” to do this (replacing “Tasks”).

These allow you to write instructions in natural language and tag tools (data connectors) and update tags.

A screenshot showing Fin’s Procedure feature.

While Zendesk Advanced AI attempts to match this with their dialogue builder flows, it is night and day in terms of ease-of-use and modernity.

Is it easy to customize them both?

Both Zendesk AI and Fin AI offer numerous configuration options: you can define the agent’s tone, decide which channels it handles, set rules for human handover and write system instructions to shape its responses.

Zendesk Advanced AI has more in-product customization - while it has fewer features, they can be more deeply adjusted building on the core Zendesk helpdesk product and their dialogue builder provides robust control, but it can feel rigid and requires more configuration.

Intercom Fin benefits from being built on top of Intercom’s helpdesk platform, so in‑product customization is extensive.

What about vendor lock‑in?

Moving helpdesks is a big deal.

It’s not a decision anyone takes lightly and is only usually done as a last resort.

So knowing whether you are going to have to move is often an important consideration.

While both Zendesk and Intercom would prefer you stay within their ecosystems, circumstances can change.

With Intercom Fin you can still take your AI agent to other helpdesks.

This means you can use Intercom Fin within Zendesk, and you can set up Custom API integrations with other helpdesk providers like HubSpot, Freshdesk, Gorgias, Zoho, Dixa and more.

Zendesk does not offer this flexibility.

If you use their AI agent and move from Zendesk, be prepared to leave all your hard work behind.

Do they have any other AI features?

Both vendors also add AI capabilities beyond the core agent.

AI tagging

Both AI agents have an AI tagging feature to remove the monotony of agents having to classify and triage tickets manually.

Zendesk’s AI tagging feature is part of their Copilot add-on (termed “Intelligent Triage”), while Fin AI is currently beta-testing a new AI tagging feature with their users.

The Zendesk AI agent tagging works doesn’t use your existing categories, instead you it will use a pre-built list of intent categories and sentiments that are relevant to your industry.

Agent translation

While both AI agents are multilingual in 95 languages, when the conversation is passed over to a member of your human team it isn’t always the case that they are fluent.

Fin AI offers the option to translate all messages in the conversation to a default language, by changing the message itself.

Help center quick answers

Another AI feature, this time unique to Zendesk AI, is their AI help center quick answers.

When a user searches for anything in the help center, Zendesk AI generates an answer to their question so they don’t have to click into the search results.

Very neat little feature that I wish all help centers had!

A screenshot showing Zendesk AI’s help center quick answers feature.

What about security, is Zendesk AI more secure than Fin AI?

Unsurprisingly, as two of the biggest players in the customer service space, they are pretty much level-pegging from a security standpoint.

But just for completeness here are the two AI agents compared for the most popular certifications:

ㅤ	Zendesk AI	Intercom Fin AI
GDPR	✅	✅
CCPA	✅	✅
SOC-2 Type II	✅	✅
HIPAA	✅	✅
ISO 270001:2022	✅	✅
ISO 27018:2019	✅	✅
ISO 27701:2019	✅	✅
ISO 27017:2015	✅	❌
ISO/IEC 42001:2023	✅	✅
FedRAMP LI-SaaS	✅	❌

So, but for a few more specific certifications, they are pretty much the same.

The big question – how much do they each cost?

The pricing model

Both Zendesk and Intercom have embraced outcome‑based pricing: you pay per automated resolution or deflection, and the respective platform decides when a resolution has occurred.

This is where things get quite complicated, as there are a number of different ways Zendesk and Intercom count Automated Resolutions, you can read more on them here.

I will try and “simplify” below:

On the Zendesk Advanced AI Agent plan an Automated Resolution is counted if the conversation was not handed over to a human agent AND Zendesk’s AI evaluation determines that the user’s request was ‘satisfactorily resolved’.

Similarly with Intercom Fin, you will be charged for the conversation if:

The user asks a question, gets a response and doesn’t get transferred to a human agent in a 24-hour window

The user asks a question, gets a response and confirms that the response helped or resolved their question

But this also means with both products that if the user asks a question, gets a response that doesn’t answer their question, goes away frustrated or distracted, then you also get charged.

The downside of outcome‑based pricing is unpredictability: if your AI agent improves or customer behavior changes, your costs can spike.

A screenshot from Reddit of a post titled: “My Intercom billing shot up by 120%, it was because of AI chatbot”. The body reads: “I used Intercom’s AI chatbot fin for my company, the cost shot up and I’m not able to see significant productivity improvement. I was already spending over $4k/month, with 40 agents. Now its shot up to $9k. Is it only me or others are also seeing it?”

In terms of their respective pricing for these ‘resolutions’:

Zendesk Advanced AI Agent:

Charges $1.50 per automated resolution on a committed plan (bought in blocks of 100 resolutions) or $2.00 per automated resolution on pay‑as‑you‑go.
Each human agent gets 5 - 15 resolutions included per month depending on your Zendesk plan.
You also need to purchase the Advanced AI add‑on ($50 per agent/month) and Copilot add‑on ($50 per agent/month) to unlock the full feature set.

Intercom Fin AI Agent:

Charges $0.99 per resolution or deflection.
The Copilot add‑on costs $35 per seat per month.

The overall cost

To illustrate the cost difference, here’s a simplified example using 20 agents and 10,000 tickets per month with a 50 % resolution rate.

We’ll assume with Zendesk you’re on the most generous Enterprise plan, getting 15 automated resolutions per agent and are purchase committed usage - i.e. this is as cheap as it gets!)

Metric	Zendesk AI	Intercom Fin AI
Number of agents	20	20
Tickets per month	10,000	10,000
AI resolution rate	50 %	50 %
Paid resolutions	4,700 (after 300 included)	5,000
AI replies monthly cost	$7,050 (@ $1.50 per resolution)	$4,950 (@ $0.99 per resolution)
Advanced AI add‑on	$1,000 ($50 per agent)	–
Copilot add‑on	$1,000 ($50 per agent)	$700 ($35 per agent)
Total monthly cost	$9,050	$5,650 ($3,400 saving)
Annual cost	$108,600	$67,800 ($40,800)

As you can see from this example, Zendesk Advanced AI is 60% more expensive than Fin AI in the best case scenario!

And if you don’t go for the committed usage and end up paying $2 per automated resolution, this increases to 101% (or 2x the price)!

Conclusion - which should I choose?

Ok, thanks for sticking with me, now, it’s time to tally up our comparison and come up with a conclusion over which AI agent you should choose for your helpdesk.

Let’s start by summarizing our categories so far:

ㅤ	Zendesk AI	Intercom Fin AI	ㅤ
Modes	7/10	8/10	Fin win
Ease of setup	6/10	8/10	Fin win
Training/Integrations	6/10	9/10	Fin win
Answer quality	7/10	8/10	Fin win
Improving	6/10	9/10	Fin win
Features	8/10	10/10	Fin win
Price	2/10	4/10	Fin win
Customization	8/10	7/10	Zendesk AI win
Lock-in	4/10	6/10	Fin win
Other AI features	9/10	7/10	Zendesk AI win
Security	10/10	10/10	Tie

Overall, a pretty decisive win for Fin I’d say!

There are very few reasons I can see why you would choose Zendesk Advanced AI over Intercom’s Fin.

If I had to summarize them they are probably:

You need one of the very specific, niche security certifications that Zendesk have, that Fin doesn’t.

You just have a preference to use Zendesk for everything, keeping your billing with one company and want to stick with a familiar UI.

You need some of their additional AI features today, like tagging and AI help center responses.

You have a very custom set-up that only the Zendesk AI features can achieve.

If none of those are you though, then you’ll get a much better AI agent, that is being developed much more quickly, for almost half the price with Intercom’s Fin AI.

Plus, one of the great things about Fin is that you can also stick with your existing Zendesk helpdesk while trying it out (and even after) because of their Zendesk app!

Good luck on your AI adventures!

FAQ

Which is easier to set up: Zendesk Advanced AI or Intercom Fin?

Fin is simpler to switch on (train from your Intercom help center/website, then go). Zendesk Advanced AI requires account enablement, knowledge setup, and dialogue/flow building - powerful but heavier to configure.

What can each AI agent be trained on (static & dynamic data)?

Both ingest help centers and websites. Zendesk also supports Salesforce; Fin accesses Notion/Confluence/Guru in Copilot. For live data/actions, both connect to external systems (Fin via Data/MCP connectors; Zendesk via Integration Builder). Neither natively pulls Drive/Dropbox today without custom work.

Which improves resolution faster over time?

Fin ships richer improvement tooling (knowledge gaps, inspect answers, batch tests, optimize dashboard, AI-suggested articles). Zendesk offers strong quantitative dashboards and A/B testing, but fewer “why/how to fix” insights.

How do they price - and which is cheaper?

Both use outcome-based pricing. Typical headline rates: Zendesk Advanced AI ≈ $1.50/resolution (committed; $2.00 PAYG) plus $50/agent for Advanced AI and $50/agent for Copilot; Intercom Fin is $0.99/resolution plus $35/seat for Copilot. Example (20 agents, 10k tickets/mo, 50% resolved): Zendesk ≈ $9,050/mo vs Fin ≈ $5,650/mo.

Will I be locked in to one help desk?

Fin is flexible - you can run Fin with Intercom or use Fin alongside Zendesk via the Zendesk app. Zendesk’s AI agent is tied to Zendesk; moving platforms means re-implementing your AI setup.

Zendesk AI vs Intercom Fin AI agent: Features, Pricing and Results (2025)

‘AI’ has been in Zendesk and Intercom for ages, what’s new?

How does an AI customer service agent work in Zendesk and Intercom?