Help Scout AI: AI Answers, AI Drafts and What They Cost
Help Scout AI is three separate things, each paid for differently. A bot answers customers in your website chat widget and bills by the resolution. An Inbox Assistant drafts, summarizes and rewrites for your team, and comes with the plan. An MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT read your Help Scout account, but not touch it.
The quick answer: Help Scout’s customer-facing AI is AI Answers, a bot in the Beacon chat widget that costs $0.75 per resolution on any paid plan. For your team there’s the Inbox Assistant: AI Assist (rewrite, shorten, translate) from Standard at $25 per user a month billed annually, and AI Drafts and AI Summarize, with no per-use charge, from Plus at $45. Help Scout’s official MCP server connects Claude and ChatGPT read-only. AI Answers lives in the chat widget on your site and app; it doesn’t answer the phone, texts or your support email. If that’s where your customers actually show up, Carly picks up calls and texts when your team can’t and hands off in one inbox, alongside the Help Scout you already run.
Help Scout AI features at a glance
US list prices from Help Scout’s pricing page and help center, checked October 2, 2026.
| Feature | What it does | Plans | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Answers (marketed as Compass) | Answers customers in the Beacon chat widget on your website, in your app and on your Docs site, from the knowledge sources you add | Paid plans; 3-month trial for new accounts | $0.75 per resolution |
| AI Drafts | Drafts a reply from your past conversations and Docs articles; can run from a workflow | Plus and Pro | Included, no per-draft charge |
| AI Summarize | Turns a long thread into a few bullet points | Plus and Pro | Included |
| AI Assist | Fixes grammar, makes text longer, shorter, friendlier or more professional, translates | Standard, Plus and Pro | Included |
| Help Scout MCP | Lets Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools search conversations, customers, Docs and reports | Standard and up (reports need Plus or Pro) | Included; read-only |
| Copilot | Answers teammates’ questions in the inbox and suggests tags, priority and next steps | Listed as “coming soon” | Not priced yet |
The Free plan (5 users, 100 contacts a month) has no AI tools at all.
What each Help Scout plan includes
| Plan | Billed annually | Billed monthly | AI included | Users |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | None | Up to 5 |
| Standard | $25 / user / mo | $30 | AI Assist | Up to 25 |
| Plus | $45 / user / mo | $54 | AI Assist, AI Drafts, AI Summarize | Up to 50 |
| Pro | $75 / user / mo | $90 | Same as Plus | Minimum 10, sold through a demo |
| AI Answers | $0.75 per resolution | $0.75 per resolution | Customer-facing bot | Any paid plan |
The line that matters is between Standard and Plus. Standard gets the rewrite button; Plus is where Help Scout drafts and summarizes. For a five-person team that upgrade is $100 a month billed annually. The full plan-by-plan breakdown is in our Help Scout pricing guide.
Accounts still on older user-based plans pay for drafting separately: $50 per 100 conversations where an AI draft gets created, billed in blocks of 100. Current Plus and Pro plans include it.
How Help Scout bills an AI resolution
A resolution is one AI Answers chat session that ended without a human. Help Scout’s help center is specific about when the meter runs:
- Billed: AI Answers gave an answer, and the customer didn’t ask for more help after its last reply. One charge per session, however many questions it answered.
- Not billed: the bot only greeted the customer or asked a clarifying question, or the customer asked for more help (in their own words or with the “I still need help” button), escalated, or went searching the knowledge base.
- Not billed: test conversations in the AI agent’s Test tab.
Five consequences worth knowing before you switch it on:
- Silence counts as success. Help Scout’s report labels a billable session “Contact helped”: an answer was given and the visitor didn’t say they needed more. A customer who gets a wrong answer and closes the widget looks identical to a happy one. Help Scout’s headline figure, a 73% average resolution rate, is measured on that definition.
- Charges land a month late. Resolutions bill in arrears on your next billing date. On an annual plan they come out of your prepaid credit, which Help Scout’s docs warn “will be used up faster than a year.”
- The free months are for new accounts. New accounts get three months of free resolutions from the day the account is created. Existing customers start paying from the first resolution.
- A spending cap switches the bot off. Set a monthly limit under Your Plan > AI Answers > Manage. When you hit it, AI Answers disappears from your Beacon until the next cycle and the widget falls back to search and contact options.
- Prepaying is cheaper. Help Scout advertises up to 33% off prepaid resolutions, arranged through sales.
What the bill looks like for a four-person team
Michael runs a four-person support team at an online coffee-equipment shop. He wants drafts for the team, so he’s on Plus. His Beacon handles about 550 AI chats a month, and at Help Scout’s advertised 73% average, about 400 of them bill as resolutions.
| Line item | Per month, billed annually | Per month, billed monthly |
|---|---|---|
| Plus, 4 users | $180 | $216 |
| 400 AI Answers resolutions at $0.75 | $300 | $300 |
| Total | $480 | $516 |
That’s $5,760 a year on annual billing, and the AI line costs more than the seats. The phone isn’t in that number. Help Scout has no built-in phone line: calls run through an Aircall integration (an add-on, with preferred pricing on Pro), and texts through a Twilio number you connect yourself, both paid for separately.
How to set up Help Scout AI
AI Answers takes about six steps, and the first one is the real work:
- Load the knowledge. Go to Tools > AI Agents. Help Scout creates one agent with your account. Add sources: a Help Scout Docs site, public web pages, PDFs, Word and Excel files, and Google Docs shared as “anyone with the link” (added one at a time). Add Improvements for facts that aren’t published anywhere.
- Set identity and guardrails. Give the agent a name, tone and instructions, and list the topics it should hand straight to your team.
- Have a Beacon with Docs enabled, embedded on your site or app, or use the Beacon built into your Docs site.
- Switch it on. Tools > Beacons > [your Beacon] > Edit Beacon > AI Answers > Enable AI Answers.
- Pick a mode. Self Service makes visitors try AI Answers before other options appear; Neutral shows it next to email, chat and Docs.
- Test, then cap. Run scenarios in the agent’s Test tab, set a monthly spending limit, and review real sessions under the Beacon’s Sessions and Insights tabs.
AI Drafts turns on per inbox under Settings > Inboxes > [inbox] > AI Drafts, where you choose the greeting and closing and can add your Docs and AI Answers sources. Help Scout’s docs say drafts run on OpenAI’s GPT-5.1, and an inbox needs about 100 past replies before the AI Draft button appears. A workflow action, Generate an AI Draft, can put a draft on matching conversations before anyone opens them.
AI Summarize is a button at the top of any conversation on Plus and Pro. It works in the web app only.
Help Scout’s MCP server is read-only
Help Scout runs an official MCP server at https://mcp.helpscout.net/mcp. You add it to Claude as a custom connector (on Claude Team and Enterprise, an Owner adds it first) or to ChatGPT under Plugins once Developer mode is on. Each teammate signs in with their own Help Scout login, so the AI only sees what that person can see.
Once connected, an AI tool can list, search and summarize conversations, pull customer profiles and history, browse inboxes, saved replies and workflows, search Docs (with a separate Docs API key), and pull reports on Plus and Pro.
What it can’t do is act. Help Scout’s docs say new connections “can’t reply to customers, add notes, change tags, or edit Docs articles,” with write actions on the roadmap and no date. Admins should know three more things:
- There’s no account-wide off switch. Any user with a login can connect their own AI tool; blocking happens in your AI platform’s admin settings.
- Disconnecting isn’t revoking. Removing the connector doesn’t reliably cancel access. Access tokens stay valid for up to 2 hours and refresh tokens for up to 30 days; deactivating the Help Scout user is the dependable cutoff.
- HIPAA doesn’t travel. On HIPAA accounts, Help Scout’s BAA doesn’t cover your AI provider.
If you want an AI agent that replies, tags and routes, here’s how to connect Help Scout to an AI agent with your own API key.
Where Help Scout AI falls short for a small team
- The bot only works in the chat widget. AI Answers answers in Beacon on your site, in your app and on your Docs site. Answering support email is listed as “coming soon,” and it has no phone or text channel.
- It can’t look anything up. It answers from your Docs, web pages and files. Learning from past conversations and connecting to apps like payment processors and CRMs are both marked “coming soon,” so “where’s my order?” still goes to a person.
- Drafting starts at Plus. A Standard team pays $25 a user and gets the rewrite button, not drafts or summaries.
- Summaries come out in English, whatever language the conversation was in.
- Existing customers get no trial on AI Answers.
- Reviewers are split on the AI push. Help Scout sits at 3.4 out of 5 on Trustpilot. Fans are loyal (“We are not switching EVER,” February 2026), but one customer wrote that it’s “following other services down the AI rabbit hole, pushing options we didn’t ask for and actively don’t want” (October 2024), and a team facing a plan change saw “no reason to use AI drafts because customers hate not talking to an actual person” (April 2025).
For a team with strong Docs and a busy chat widget, none of this is a dealbreaker. For a small business whose customers mostly call, text or email, the AI is pointed at the wrong door. To compare how other help desks price their bots, see our breakdowns of Zendesk AI and Intercom Fin.
Carly: AI on support calls, texts and email, next to Help Scout
Carly is an AI assistant for businesses, and Carly for teams puts it on your business line. When the team is busy or gone for the day, Carly picks up the call, texts the customer back, and answers from your own FAQs, policies and documents. It knows the caller from your email and CRM, so the customer who wrote in on Tuesday isn’t a stranger on Thursday’s call. It books on the right teammate’s real calendar before the customer hangs up, and passes the conversation to a person when it should. Calls and texts land in one team inbox with your email, where Emily can take over a thread and hand it back.
Help Scout can stay where it is for chat and Docs. Carly connects to thousands of apps, Help Scout among them, so a workflow can log each call in your Help Scout queue. For support email, Carly can run an email agent with its own address that answers from the knowledge you give it.
The Carly team sets up the number with you, either the one customers already dial or a new local one, and the phone line is priced on a short call. Outside the phone line, Carly has free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month. Get started with Carly and give it the ten questions your team answered most last month. For more options, see our guides to AI answering services and the best AI agents for customer support.
FAQ
What is Help Scout AI?
The AI built into Help Scout: AI Answers, a customer-facing bot in the Beacon chat widget, and the Inbox Assistant for your team, which covers AI Assist, AI Drafts and AI Summarize. Help Scout’s product pages now call the engine behind AI Answers “Compass.”
How much does Help Scout AI cost?
AI Answers costs $0.75 per resolution on any paid plan, with three free months for new accounts. AI Assist is included from Standard ($25 per user a month billed annually, $30 monthly). AI Drafts and AI Summarize are included, with no per-use charge, from Plus ($45 annually, $54 monthly). The Free plan has no AI.
What counts as a resolution in Help Scout AI Answers?
A chat session where AI Answers gave an answer and the customer didn’t ask for more help afterward. It’s billed once per session. Greetings, clarifying questions, escalations, “I still need help” clicks and test conversations aren’t billed.
What are Help Scout AI Drafts?
A button in the reply editor that writes a draft from your past conversations and Docs articles for a teammate to edit and send. It’s included on Plus and Pro, needs about 100 past replies in an inbox to start, and can be triggered by a workflow.
Does Help Scout have an official MCP server?
Yes, at https://mcp.helpscout.net/mcp, on Standard, Plus and Pro. It connects Claude, ChatGPT and other AI tools to your conversations, customers, Docs and reports, but new connections are read-only: they can’t reply, add notes, change tags or edit Docs.
Can Help Scout AI answer phone calls or texts?
No. AI Answers works only in the chat widget. Help Scout routes calls through an Aircall integration and texts through a Twilio number you connect, and its AI answers neither. Carly answers your business line and texts when your team can’t, books on real calendars and hands off in one inbox. Try Carly on your own support line.
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