Gorgias AI: What AI Agent Does and What It Costs in 2026
Gorgias AI is the AI Agent built into Gorgias, the helpdesk most Shopify brands start on. It answers shoppers, takes actions in Shopify and tries to close sales. The part most stores only learn from the first invoice: a conversation it resolves is billed twice.
The quick answer: Gorgias AI Agent answers your Shopify store’s customers on email, chat, SMS, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. It can cancel orders, issue refunds, start returns and edit addresses in Shopify, and its Shopping Assistant side recommends products and hands out discount codes. It costs $0.90 per automated interaction on annual plans ($1.00 monthly), each plan includes 30 to 530 of them, and every one above the allowance bills at $1.50. Each automated interaction also counts as a helpdesk ticket. It isn’t on your phone line: Gorgias Voice is an add-on for human agents. For AI on your store’s calls and texts, Carly answers when your team can’t and hands off in one inbox, next to the Gorgias you already run.
Gorgias AI at a glance
What Gorgias sells under the AI Agent name, from its product pages, pricing page and help center, checked October 2, 2026.
| Product | What it does | Where it works | What it costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Agent (support) | Answers from your help center, website, documents and guidance; follows skills for returns, order status and cancellations; hands over when unsure | Email, chat, SMS, Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp; Shopify stores only | $0.90 per automated interaction annual, $1.00 monthly; $1.50 above the allowance |
| Actions | Refunds, cancellations, order edits, address changes, returns, discounts, subscription pauses, custom API calls | Run only from a skill or guidance; not on Starter | Part of AI Agent |
| Shopping Assistant | Proactive greetings, product recommendations, cart upsells, discount codes | Website chat | Included in AI Agent for accounts created after May 28, 2025 |
| Gaia | AI admin that drafts skills, audits handovers, answers performance questions and runs scheduled reports | Inside Gorgias | Not listed separately on the pricing page |
| Voice | Phone line for your human agents: phone menus, routing, transfers to mobile, AI call and voicemail summaries | Add-on, Basic plan and up | From $25 a month for 25 voice tickets, billed annually |
What AI Agent costs on each Gorgias plan
AI Agent is on every plan now. Gorgias’s plan cards bundle the helpdesk with AI Agent and price the included automated interactions at $0.90 each billed annually, $1.00 monthly.
| Plan | Tickets a month | AI interactions included | Helpdesk + AI Agent, billed annually | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 50 | 30 | Monthly billing only | $40 ($10 + $30) |
| Basic | 300 | 30 | $77 ($50 + $27) | $90 |
| Pro | 2,000 | 190 | $471 ($300 + $171) | $550 |
| Advanced | 5,000 | 530 | $1,227 ($750 + $477) | $1,430 |
What the cards don’t spell out:
- Interactions above the allowance cost $1.50, not $0.90. That rate sits in Gorgias’s pricing data rather than on the cards.
- Starter’s AI Agent can answer but not act. The comparison table leaves Actions (cancel, discount, apply), brand voice and guardrails, and the Voice and SMS add-ons off Starter, which also caps you at 3 user seats.
- Revenue attribution, the report on what Shopping Assistant sold, is on Pro and Advanced only.
- Extra tickets cost $0.40 each on Starter and Basic and $0.36 on Pro and Advanced.
The trial is 7 days and doesn’t ask for payment details.
How Gorgias bills an AI conversation twice
Gorgias charges a ticket fee for any conversation your helpdesk replies to, whether a person, a Rule or AI Agent sent the reply, plus an automation fee when AI Agent resolves it alone. Its billing article spells out the cases:
- AI Agent resolves it with no handover: one ticket plus one automated interaction.
- AI Agent replies, then hands over: one ticket only.
- A person replies within 72 hours of an AI resolution: a ticket only.
- Flows, Order Management or Article Recommendations resolve it: an automation fee only, from the same allowance as AI Agent.
- Proactive prompts (search assist, AI FAQs): free if ignored, a ticket plus an automated interaction if the shopper replies and AI Agent finishes the conversation.
- Old threads come back as new tickets: a reply more than 10 days after the last email, or 3 days on chat or SMS, opens a new ticket, billable once answered.
- Test conversations in AI Agent’s Playground aren’t billed.
Accounts created before May 28, 2025 that haven’t subscribed to AI Agent and upgraded to Shopping Assistant skills stay on legacy pricing, where a ticket is billed as one or the other, never both.
Here’s how that plays out for Josh, who runs a Shopify store selling coffee gear. He gets about 250 conversations a month and is on Basic with AI Agent at $77 a month billed annually. AI Agent resolves 110 on its own: 30 come out of the allowance and 80 bill at $1.50, another $120, so a normal month is $197. In November, volume doubles to 500. He’s 200 tickets over his plan ($80 at $0.40), and AI Agent resolves 220, so 190 bill at $1.50 ($285). That month costs $442, and the customers who’d rather phone about a late order still reach a person or a voicemail box. If that’s the gap, try Carly on the line itself.
What Gorgias AI Agent can do in Shopify
Gorgias’s AI Agent page lists the actions it takes in Shopify and your connected apps: full or partial refunds, cancelling an order that’s still eligible, editing or replacing an order, updating an address before fulfillment, tracking a package, starting a return with a prepaid label, applying a discount, adding to cart, pausing or skipping a subscription, resending a confirmation, and escalating to a person with context. Custom actions can call any API, and Gorgias says its library holds more than 130. The help center adds the conditions:
- Actions only run from a skill or guidance. A skill is the instructions for one conversation type, like a return. No skill, no action.
- Shopify only. AI Agent needs a connected Shopify store and isn’t supported on BigCommerce, Magento or WooCommerce.
- Shoppers sign in for order details. On chat, AI Agent asks for a one-time code by email or SMS before sharing order history. A shopper who can’t sign in goes to your team.
- Handovers are automatic when it lacks confidence, hits a handover topic you listed, finds no relevant knowledge, the shopper asks for a person, or it detects anger or frustration.
- Chats close themselves after 10 minutes of shopper inactivity.
Gorgias’s own benchmark puts automation at roughly half of conversations, from 48% for home goods to 53% for fashion. Product questions automate best (82%), billing and account questions worst (31%).
Shopping Assistant: the selling side of AI Agent
Shopping Assistant is AI Agent working as a salesperson in your website chat. It greets visitors based on their behavior, recommends products, suggests upsells from the cart, and generates unique discount codes when a shopper’s intent warrants one. Accounts created after May 28, 2025 get it with AI Agent; older accounts upgrade from AI Agent > Shopping Assistant > Upgrade Now and accept updated pricing and terms.
Two sliders steer it, under the Strategy tab:
- Selling style: Educational, Moderate or Promotional, from asking questions to assertive calls to action.
- Discount strategy: No discount, Conservative, Strategic or Generous, plus the fixed discount percentage it’s allowed to offer.
A sales chat that AI Agent finishes without a handover bills like a support resolution: one ticket plus one automated interaction.
Where Gorgias AI Agent answers, and where it doesn’t
Gorgias’s setup guide lists the channels under AI Agent > Deploy: email, chat, SMS, Instagram DMs and Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp. SMS is itself a paid add-on, from $17 a month.
The phone isn’t on that list. Gorgias Voice is built for your human agents: an IVR phone menu, routing, transfers to a mobile, recordings, and AI summaries of calls and voicemails. It’s priced by voice tickets, from $25 a month for 25 billed annually, and isn’t available on Starter. A voice ticket bills when an agent answers, a caller leaves a voicemail, or an outbound call connects, and a phone menu’s “send call to SMS” text is a billable SMS ticket. One customer who emails, gets a call back and then a shipping text is three billable tickets on three meters, and AI Agent never touched the call.
How to set up Gorgias AI Agent
You need an active AI Agent subscription, a Shopify store connected to Gorgias, and a Lead, Admin or Account Owner role. Gorgias’s go-live guide runs in this order:
- Add knowledge. AI Agent > Knowledge > Create content: help center articles, your website, documents, URLs and guidance. At least one source is required.
- Create skills. AI Agent > Skills > Create skill. Start with returns, order status and cancellations.
- Add actions. AI Agent > Actions > Create action, then reference it inside a skill.
- Set tone of voice and handover instructions, plus selling style and discounts if you use Shopping Assistant.
- Test in the Playground. Test conversations aren’t billed and send nothing to real shoppers.
- Go live. AI Agent > Deploy, then switch it on channel by channel.
- Review. Gorgias suggests reviewing at least 10 AI-handled tickets in the first week.
Gaia can draft skills from your ticket history and flag the ones causing the most handovers. Gorgias says AI Agent can be live in under an hour; the skills and actions that let it actually refund, cancel and edit orders are where the real work sits.
What merchants report about Gorgias AI Agent
Gorgias sits at 2.1 out of 5 on Trustpilot. Most complaints are about support, spam and the new UI (our Gorgias alternatives guide covers those). The ones about AI Agent are about control:
- A September 2026 reviewer who runs Gorgias for three clients: “I’ve now been waiting 90 days for a fix so that the AI agent can give a different response to a retail vs a B2B customer.”
- An April 2026 reviewer removed an AI order cancellation action from a guide, “but the AI continued behaving as though the action still existed for roughly 12 hours afterward.”
- A March 2026 reviewer says the bot “sent incorrect responses to customers, closed tickets without proper replies, or failed to respond entirely.”
The happier reviews describe automations handling around 40% of inquiries. To swap only the AI layer, see our best AI automation tools for Gorgias; for how another helpdesk meters its AI, the Zendesk AI breakdown.
Carly: AI on your store’s calls and texts, next to Gorgias
Carly is an AI assistant for businesses, and Carly for teams puts it on your business line. When nobody can pick up, Carly answers the call, texts the customer back, and answers from your own shipping page, return policy and FAQs. It recognizes the caller from your email and CRM, so Claire, who emailed last week about a damaged mug, isn’t a stranger when she phones. It books a callback on the right teammate’s real calendar while she’s still on the line, and hands the conversation to a person when it should. Every call and text lands in one team inbox alongside email, where Michael can take a thread over and hand it back.
Keep Gorgias for email and chat if it’s working. Carly connects to thousands of apps, Gorgias and Shopify included, so a workflow can send each call summary into Gorgias and your queue stays the system of record. If you’d rather have a dedicated AI inbox for support email as well, Carly can run an email agent with its own address.
The Carly team sets the number up with you, the one customers already call or a new local one, and the phone line is priced on a short call. Beyond the phone line, Carly has free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Get started with Carly and hand it last month’s ten most common customer questions. For more options, see our guides to AI answering services and the best AI agents for customer support.
FAQ
What is Gorgias AI?
Gorgias AI is AI Agent, the AI built into the Gorgias helpdesk for Shopify stores. It answers customers on email, chat, SMS and social channels, takes actions in Shopify like refunds and cancellations, and works as a Shopping Assistant that recommends products and offers discounts.
How much does Gorgias AI Agent cost?
$0.90 per automated interaction on annual plans and $1.00 monthly, with 30 included on Starter and Basic, 190 on Pro and 530 on Advanced. Above that, each costs $1.50. With AI Agent, Basic is $77 a month billed annually and Pro $471, and every automated interaction also counts as a helpdesk ticket.
What counts as an automated interaction in Gorgias?
A customer request resolved with no human agent, by AI Agent or by an automation feature like Flows, Order Management or Article Recommendations, where the customer doesn’t need a person within 72 hours. When AI Agent resolves a ticket alone, you pay a ticket fee and an automation fee. If it hands over, or a person replies within 72 hours, you pay the ticket fee only.
Does Gorgias AI Agent work with WooCommerce or BigCommerce?
No. Gorgias’s help center says AI Agent needs a connected Shopify store and isn’t supported on BigCommerce, Magento or WooCommerce stores. The Gorgias helpdesk itself still connects to WooCommerce on every plan, BigCommerce from Basic and Magento from Pro.
Can Gorgias AI Agent answer phone calls?
Not today. AI Agent deploys to email, chat, SMS, Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Gorgias Voice is a separate add-on for human agents, billed per voice ticket.
Can I keep Gorgias and still put AI on my phone line?
Yes. Carly answers your business line and texts when your team can’t, recognizes callers from your email and CRM, books on real calendars and hands off to a person in one inbox. It connects to Gorgias and Shopify, so call summaries can still land in your Gorgias queue. Set up Carly on your store’s line.
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