Overview

Ari is a customer facing AI Agent that's available out of the box with Plain. No code required.

Think of Ari as your Support teams first responder. When you assign Ari to a thread, it will use your configured knowledge sources to resolve customer questions automatically and efficiently.

If Ari can't help your customer directly, it will hand off to a human member of your team.

How it works

Early handoff

In some cases, Ari will preemptively hand off to a human without attempting to help further. This happens when the customer is angry, the support request is about sales/pricing, the customer asks to talk to a human, the report is security-sensitive, or the report is about downtime or an incident.

Automatic priority increases

In addition, Ari will automatically increase the thread’s priority in certain cases:

Sets priority to High for security-related requests.
Sets priority to Urgent for incidents or downtime reports.

How to set up Ari

Add your knowledge sources in Plain AI → Knowledge sources. You can find out more on how to do this in Knowledge sources.
Create your agent in Plain AI → Ari. You can optionally customize the name and appearance. of Ari. The customer will always know when they're talking to an agent so you don't have to include that in the name.
Go to any support request and assign your agent to it to have take over the conversation.

Monitoring Ari

To see the support requests Ari has handled, you can either go to any queue and filter by assignee, or you can go to Plain AI → Agent activity which will show you the threads that Ari has been involved in.

Showing Ari's status to customers

You can optionally show customers when Ari is actively working on their conversation. When enabled, the chat widget displays Ari's name, avatar, and a working indicator while it processes a response.

To turn this on, go to Settings → Chat and enable Show agent status to users under Configuration.