Quick answer
Four products lead AI customer support in 2026, with four different business models. Intercom Fin is self-serve at $0.99 per resolved conversation and runs on Intercom, Zendesk, or Salesforce. Sierra is enterprise, sales-led, and builds bespoke chat and voice agents for large consumer brands. Decagon sits between them with strong analytics and enterprise deployments. Salesforce Agentforce is native to Salesforce data, from $2 per conversation. The right one depends on your volume, your helpdesk, and whether you have a team to run a project.
AI support agents have crossed from "deflects easy tickets" to "resolves most of them", and the market has sorted itself by who buys: support managers with a credit card, or enterprises with a procurement process.
Intercom Fin
- Answers from your help centre and past conversations; Fin Tasks take actions like refunds
- Pay only for conversations it fully resolves — $0.99 each
- Works on Intercom, Zendesk, and Salesforce Service Cloud
- Live in days for teams with a decent help centre
- Cost climbs at very high volume; quality is capped by your documentation
Sierra
- Bespoke agents for large consumer brands, chat and voice
- Deep integrations with order systems, loyalty programmes, and legacy stacks
- Outcome-based enterprise pricing negotiated per customer
- Months to deploy, with a team on both sides
Decagon
- Enterprise agents with strong conversation analytics and agent-operations tooling
- Popular with fast-growing tech companies that outgrew self-serve tools
- Custom pricing; faster deployment than Sierra, more hands-on than Fin
Salesforce Agentforce
- Grounded in CRM data and governed by Salesforce permissions
- Prebuilt service, sales, and internal agents; low-code builder
- From $2 per conversation, or Flex Credits and per-user plans
- Only sensible if Salesforce is already your system of record
How to choose
- Under a few thousand tickets a month with a good help centre: Fin, this week
- Consumer brand with complex systems and a budget for a project: Sierra or Decagon
- Salesforce shop wanting one agent platform across service and sales: Agentforce
- Whatever you pick, measure resolution rate and customer satisfaction, not deflection — deflecting a customer who needed help is a failure that looks like a saving
Related reading
Bottom line
Fin for most teams, Sierra or Decagon for enterprises with complexity, Agentforce for Salesforce customers. The tools are good enough now that the difference is in your data and your escalation design, not the model.
