AI service desk

Autonomous AI agents solve complex interactions

AI copilot empowers and supports agents

Automated customer service improves efficiency

AI-powered knowledge bases support self-service

Summarization and transcription enhance customer insights

Advanced reporting and analytics improve personalization and consistency

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.

• Personalized, Proactive Support: AI help desks can leverage machine learning to identify intent and use customer and employee data stored in customer intelligence platforms to understand individual preferences and needs.
• Increased Agent Productivity and Efficiency: AI-powered features can streamline workflows and boost the skills of your IT and support teams, while intelligent routing allows agents to focus on resolving issues instead of sorting them.
• Reduced Operational Costs: By automating tedious, time-consuming manual tasks and allowing AI agents to autonomously handle interactions, AI help desks improve operations and drive cost savings.
• Improved Scalability: AI-powered knowledge management tools help businesses scale by streamlining content creation, including new content, existing updates, and content gap identification.
• Predictable Forecasting: Using predictive analytics, companies can identify trends, anticipate potential issues, and produce data-driven recommendations that can be used to make proactive decisions to prevent problems before they arise.
• 24/7 Support: Tools like customer service chatbots allow businesses to respond to customer inquiries at all hours, enabling them to manage more requests without increasing headcount.

These AI service desk benefits help prevent agent burnout and employee turnover while empowering agents to provide essential support and increase job sophistication.

To support your customers and employees, check out your AI help desk software options for 2025 and beyond.

Jump to:

• Zendesk: Best for AI-powered CX and employee service
• Freshdesk: Best for custom workflows
• Zoho Desk: Best for SMBs
• Help Scout: Best for small teams
• Intercom: Best for in-app support

1. Zendesk

Best for: AI-powered CX and employee service

Zendesk offers an intuitive, easy-to-use AI help desk solution for IT and customer support teams. Zendesk AI service desk software integrates AI tools directly into the Zendesk Agent Workspace, providing a seamless, unified interface for omnichannel support.

Our solution is built on billions of real customer service interactions, understands CX at its core, and is designed to enhance customer service and increase agent productivity and efficiency. Our AI help desk software also supports high-quality features like:

• AI agents
• AI copilot
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Intelligent routing
• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Intent and sentiment analysis

Zendesk is also ready out of the box, sets up instantly, and is accessible to anyone—no need for developers, heavy IT spending, or months of lead time. Plus, our service desk software was designed with agents in mind, and its intuitive interface delivers a fast time to value, enhanced ROI, and a low total cost of ownership.

Price: Plans start at $19 per agent/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

2. Freshdesk

Best for: Custom workflows

Freshworks offers a customer service help desk called Freshdesk. This AI service desk features tools like:

• An agent workspace
• A ticketing system
• Chatbots
• Social media support
• Predictive analysis

Freshdesk’s integration options enable support teams to manage, prioritize, and resolve customer requests. Freshdesk also offers AI-powered tools that users can add to their help desk to provide conversational support and self-service options to customers and employees.

This AI help desk software offers customization options, including unique ticket fields and adjustable workflows. However, the software’s AI may not be able to automate the knowledge management process, meaning businesses may need to identify content gaps, update outdated information, or create new content manually.

Price: Paid plans start at $15 per agent/month, billed annually. A free plan and a 14-day free trial are available.

3. Zoho Desk

Best for: SMBs

Zoho Desk is an AI service desk for small businesses and teams looking to provide omnichannel support to users. It uses an AI-powered assistant, Zia, to provide chat support to customers using knowledge base information.

Using AI-powered features, Zoho Desk enables teams to identify topics users need to update and remove and automatically alert content management teams to make the changes.

Zoho Desk offers additional features like:

• Chatbots
• AI-powered knowledge management
• Intelligent routing
• Reporting and analytics

This AI help desk can also identify customer sentiment and intent of incoming customer requests and automatically tag tickets. It also routes interactions to the appropriate agent to handle them. With Zia, this software can also make grammar suggestions by using machine learning techniques to analyze the context of each sentence. However, the knowledge base editor works best with simple documentation because it lacks formatting options.

Price: Plans start at $7 per user/month, billed annually. A 15-day free trial is available.

4. Help Scout

Best for: Small teams

Ideal for smaller teams who can’t support complex setups, Help Scout is a customer support platform where 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 includes features like a shared inbox, live chat, and knowledge base software. The platform also offers AI-powered features, 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. AI Assist also uses generative AI to adjust the length of messages.

Price: Paid plans start at $50 per month, billed annually. A free plan and a 15-day free trial are available.

5. Intercom

Best for: In-app support

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 can summarize ticket information, expand, rephrase, and adjust the tone of user responses, and route requests to the appropriate agent.

This AI service desk offers AI-powered in-app support and product onboarding. Additionally, its AI chatbot, Fin, uses knowledge base content to provide automated answers and transfer escalated problems to human agents. However, Intercom’s pricing structure can be expensive for growing teams, and features are often split between packages.

Price: Plans start at $29 per seat/month, billed annually. A 14-day free trial is available.

Below, you’ll find the most important factors to consider when picking an AI service desk so the software aligns with your business goals and meets your requirements.

• Ease of use: Ensure the AI help desk software has an intuitive interface and customizable workflows so your IT and support teams can navigate and manage the solution without too much training.
• Core product features: Determine what core product features are necessary for meeting your business objectives, such as industry alignment, omnichannel options, AI features, and integrations.
• Security and compliance: Your AI help desk must comply with data security and privacy regulations, offer granular access controls, and be updated regularly to avoid threats or cyberattacks.
• Time to value (TTV): Fast deployment with easy-to-use software results in a fast TTV and can help your business see a quicker ROI.
• Total cost of ownership (TCO): The cost of software is more than the subscription price, so consider additional costs like licensing fees, ongoing maintenance, additional training, and hidden costs.
• Support and partnership: Your vendor should provide quality service, including 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.

With AI help desk software like Zendesk, you can gain guidance from thought leaders and a rich community of founders and CX experts. With quality support, a fast TTV, and a low TCO, Zendesk helps each customer get the most out of their AI service desk, now and in the future.

Zendesk builds relationships and creates long-term partnerships with customers. Check out these customer stories to see the real ROI of partnering with Zendesk.

Liberty delivers personalized service

“With Zendesk AI, I'm seeing an exciting opportunity to streamline and be more efficient. That will allow our team to have more time to work on projects of importance to the business, be it driving revenue or new sales channels.”

—Ian Hunt, director of customer services at Liberty London

American Expediting ups productivity by 3X

“Customers have given us a lot of new markets since the Zendesk implementation just because of our ability to answer questions and get things done on time. Using Zendesk and providing a great customer experience has been an important part of our growth.”

—Kirk Serjeanston, chief information officer at American Expediting

Unity saves $1.3 million with automation and self-service

“Last year, we deflected almost 8,000 tickets due to self-service enabled by Zendesk. That amounts to about $1.3M saved due to the reduction in tickets.”

—David Schroeder, senior manager of services support at Unity