Add AI to your helpdesk without replacing it.

Most teams that want AI in support already have a helpdesk that works. It holds years of tickets, the views your team lives in, and macros that took a long time to get right. Moving all of that to get an AI agent is a large cost for a small part of the value.

Aide goes the other way. It connects to the helpdesk you have, reads your tickets and writes its drafts where your team already works. This guide covers the connection, the first week of drafts, and how an inbox moves from drafts to answering customers.

Connect your helpdesk

Setup is guided, and it ends with a real draft on a real ticket.

1. Sign up free at my.aide.app and choose Zendesk, Gorgias or Front. You land on that helpdesk's setup page.
2. Connect it and approve access. Aide reads every brand in Zendesk, every shared inbox in Front, and every chat, email and messaging integration in Gorgias. It imports 90 days of history for context and never replies to any of it.
3. Read the drafts on recent tickets. Aide drafts on a few open tickets and a few solved ones. On a solved ticket, its draft sits next to the reply your team actually sent, which is the quickest way to judge it.
4. Set up where drafts show. In Zendesk, an admin installs the Aide app once from the Zendesk Marketplace. In Front, the plugin comes with the app you approved. In Gorgias, the Aide card sits in the sidebar, and an "Aide: insert draft" macro drops the draft into the reply box.
5. Wait for the next ticket. The last setup step tells you when one arrives and links straight to Aide's draft. If the inbox is quiet, send a test email to your support address.

If you run a store, connect Shopify during setup too. Drafts can then use the customer's orders, shipments and live tracking, so "where is order #1042?" gets the real status instead of a template.

The first week of drafts

Spend the first week reading drafts, not writing rules. Your team uses a draft, edits it or ignores it, and nothing goes to a customer.

Three things are worth watching:

• Where drafts are right as written. Those topics are your first candidates to hand over. For most stores that means order tracking and shipping questions.
• Where drafts are wrong. A wrong draft usually points at a missing article or a policy nobody wrote down, not at the AI.
• How the drafts sound. On a new account, Aide reads your team's past replies and writes its own style guide: what your business is, how replies sound, how they close and how long they run. Drafts should already read like your team.

When a teammate rewrites a draft, an owner or admin can ask Aide why. It compares its draft with what was sent, checks whether the answer was in your knowledge, and proposes the smallest fix, such as one article or one instruction line, for you to approve. Your team's judgment ends up written down where the next draft can use it.

Drafts built from your macros

Your macros are the best record of how your team answers, so Aide drafts from them. It looks at your Zendesk or Gorgias macros, macros made in Aide, and your team's past replies, and works out which macro fits which situation. There is nothing to map. Macros your team stopped sending drop out on their own.

A macro is a starting point, not a script. Say a customer writes: "Tracking says delivered but there's nothing here, order #2207." Your "Delivered, not received" macro asks for the delivery address and offers to open a claim with the carrier. Aide's draft keeps that offer, leaves out the question about the order number because the customer already gave it, and fills in their name.

• Aide uses at most one macro per draft.
• The internal note says which macro a draft was based on. That line never appears in the reply.
• Each macro shows what Aide learned to use it for, with a switch to keep it out of drafts.

From drafts to live replies

Two settings decide how far Aide goes: the AI level on each topic, and the rollout stage of each inbox.

A topic is the kind of request a ticket is about, such as order tracking or a refund. Each one is set to AI Agent, where Aide acts within the scenarios your team sets up, Drafts, where a person confirms first, or None. Every new topic starts on Drafts.

An inbox starts in Watch only. Aide decides and drafts inside Aide and writes nothing to the helpdesk. Next, it answers a short list of test senders, usually your own team's addresses. Then a share of real conversations, then everyone. You can move an inbox back to Watch only at any time.

Once an inbox is live, Aide answers there itself: email tickets in Zendesk, email in Front, and live chat and email in Gorgias. On other ticket types it leaves an internal note for your team. It leaves alone any inbox another AI agent already answers, and in Gorgias it steps aside when a person has the ticket.

A rollout most teams can follow:

1. Leave every topic on Drafts for the first week.
2. Pick one busy topic where the drafts were right as written, and set it to AI Agent.
3. Move one inbox to test senders, then to a share of conversations.
4. Widen it to everyone once the replies hold up, then pick the next topic.

The checks that run on every reply, live or not, are covered in AI customer service guardrails.