The promises of AI have been sky-high: maximum efficiency to scale your business at record speed, or even a single AI agent replacing dozens of human ones. Sounds amazing, right?
But reality hasn’t stacked up; we’ve all seen the AI horror stories. AI is powerful, especially for handling straightforward questions that can be answered with support content or past conversations. But solving them doesn’t eliminate most of the work.
The 80/20 rule still applies. Even if AI handles 80% of your inquiries, the last 20% are the hardest — complex, high-stakes issues that take the most time and often require coordination across multiple teams. That’s where traditional AI falls short. It operates in a silo and isn’t built for behind-the-scenes collaboration.
What’s next in CX is not just autonomous AI. The future of CX is human-directed AI.
We built Front for this new era of customer support; enabling teams to deliver exceptional service with complete control over quality and cost. Unlike AI tools that blindly deflect as a first line of defense, Front AI gets every ticket to the best-equipped resource — whether that’s AI, a human, or a combination of both.
Now, we’re excited to announce the all-new Front: a reimagined interface and powerful new Front AI tools to help you analyze, assist, and automate your support workflows with complete control.
Topics: Analyze conversation history to understand customer contact reasons and power automation.
Copilot: Give your team a jumpstart on responding while maintaining control and oversight with real-time suggested replies.
Agent (coming soon): Safely automate resolutions across channels with the only quality-first AI agent.
Smart CSAT: Infer customer satisfaction across your conversations, no surveys required.
Smart QA: Optimize agent performance with fully automated QA reviews.
Plus it’s all wrapped up within our reimagined inbox experience to help your team move even faster.
Join us tomorrow, July 16th, at Control Shift to learn more and see these features live.
“Front AI Copilot now handles a solid share of our incoming questions, and most drafts are good to go after a quick glance. That gives our customer support team back meaningful hours each week—time we can spend guiding customers to the right Santevia filtration solution instead of re-typing routine answers.” - Matthew Gohl, Chief Executive Officer, Santevia Water Systems Inc.
Analyze all your conversations to power automation with Topics
Instead of trial-and-error support, which learns what shouldn’t be automated at your customer’s expense, Front understands this from the start.
Simply connect a channel and Front AI starts analyzing your past conversations to understand the full landscape of customer inquiries. Front AI learns what your customers ask, how your team responds, and where automation can make the biggest impact.
Front AI automatically organizes and categorizes these conversations into Topics — the most common reasons your customers reach out — to easily identify trends and pinpoint high-impact opportunities for automation.
With Topics you can:
Uncover conversation trends: Understand customer needs, emerging issues and common requests.
Get inquiries into the right hands: Route conversations to a specific inbox or assignee based on their Topic—no AI training needed. For instance, refund questions go straight to billing, and complex tech issues to specialized support.
Improve agent performance: Pinpoint areas where agents might need more training or resources, guided by prevalent Topics.
Topics is available now and included in all current pricing plans and our legacy Growth and Scale plans.
Take control and get an AI boost with Copilot
Most AI support tools direct all support inquiries to a bot, only handing off to an agent after a customer desperately requests to “TALK TO A HUMAN!”
Instead of learning from AI mistakes, Front learns from your customer conversations and help content to automatically suggest replies for your team to review, refine, and send. Copilot gives your team a jumpstart on responding, while maintaining control and oversight over the replies. As they use and adjust these AI-powered suggestions, Front continuously learns, improving over time with this human-in-the-loop approach.
With Copilot, your team can:
Respond faster: Equip agents with the right information at the right time to resolve issues efficiently.
Maintain control and oversight: Agents can review, edit, and personalize suggested replies for increased efficiency and a top-notch customer experience.
Accelerate onboarding: Get new agents up to speed quickly with easy access to relevant knowledge and suggested replies.
Improve response quality: Ensure consistent, accurate, and on-brand communication with always up-to-date inputs.
One beta customer, Fathom, leverages Front AI features like Copilot to handle issues faster while still delivering exceptional support, using over 65% of the suggested replies generated. Despite a 41% increase in total conversations over a one-year period, Even as Fathom’s total conversation volume grew 41% year over year, the team improved average response time by 60% and cut total reply time by 56%, supported by increased efficiency with Front.
“I’m using AI to make the people on my team more efficient, more effective, and more confident in their roles. Front AI features like Copilot enable my team members to do their best work because it’s pulling from existing sources and decreasing the time to research a reply. Copilot gives my team a jumping off point versus starting from scratch, which is helpful when it comes to reply time, an important metric we track to ensure a strong customer experience.” - Alyssa Medina, Head of Customer Support, Fathom
Copilot is available now and limited usage is included in all current plans and our legacy Growth and Scale plans. Unlimited usage is available for the current Enterprise plan and customers on the new Starter and Professional plans, as well as legacy Growth and Scale plans, can purchase the Copilot add-on for $20/seat/month for unlimited usage.
Coming soon: Go beyond mistakes-first automation with Agent
As Front AI learns, certain Topics will emerge as safe to automate: those with highly accepted, minimally edited suggested replies. Instead of an all-or-nothing approach, it’s easy to choose exactly what’s ready for the fully autonomous Agent and route the rest to your team first.
Rather than escalating to humans when AI fails, Front AI only handles what it’s set up to succeed with: a win-win for both customers and your team. As Front’s confidence level grows, you can safely automate even more with Agent to improve deflection rate while maintaining a top-quality experience.
What makes Front AI Agent different?
No more mistakes-first automation: Only route inquiries that AI can accurately answer.
Deep customization, easy setup: Agent references your existing help content and customer conversations for tailored, accurate responses from day one without any heavy lifting.
Always learning as your business evolves: While other AI tools get stale or require costly consultants, Front AI keeps learning from your team — using new customer interactions to power more accurate automation over time.
Agent is coming this Fall, but you can join the waitlist now.
Measure performance and satisfaction with Smart QA and CSAT
In May, we launched Smart QA, our AI-powered QA solution that gives support leaders a complete understanding of agent performance. Get automated, always-on service quality insights with AI-powered scorecards and dedicated analytics — built natively into Front. With Smart QA, support leaders can track performance on their preferred criteria, such as professionalism, empathy, or personalization.
Today, Smart CSAT goes beyond agent performance to truly understand customer satisfaction. Traditional surveys are too limiting: providing too few responses which are disproportionately positive or negative.
With Smart CSAT, you can:
Go beyond traditional surveys: Automatically infer customer satisfaction on all meaningful tickets, instead of relying on limited survey responses.
Get a more accurate view of customer satisfaction: AI provides a comprehensive and more accurate distribution of scores, moving past the disproportionately extreme results of traditional surveys.
Continuously raise the bar on support: Combine Smart QA and CSAT for clarity on both agent performance and customer satisfaction to help consistently exceed service standards.
Smart QA and Smart CSAT are both available now and included in the new Enterprise plan. For the new Starter and Professional plans, as well as legacy Growth and Scale plans, Smart QA is available as an add-on for $20/seat/month and Smart CSAT for $10/seat/month.
A reimagined inbox experience for the new era of customer support
In this new era of customer support, it’s time for an all-new Front inbox experience, for even greater productivity.
We’re launching a sleek, streamlined inbox experience to simplify daily workflows, reduce visual clutter, and keep your team focused. The new inbox experience gives teams:
Clearer prioritization: New Open, Later, and Done sections in your individual workspace help you focus on the conversations that need your attention most.
More space to work: Collapse the left sidebar for distraction-free reading and replying. Just hover to reveal it when needed!
Faster context at a glance: A compact conversation header and moving search into the sidebar give you more space for reading while keeping the key details visible.
Accessible, easy-to-remember shortcuts: Quick reminders for shortcuts throughout the app help users learn new ways to boost efficiency even further.
The future of CX is human-directed AI
Front delivers a powerful but pragmatic approach to AI in customer support — customized, controlled, and designed to evolve with your business.
AI-powered onboarding makes getting started Front faster and easier than ever. Just connect a channel, such as email or live chat, and Front will analyze your historical conversations, create your custom Topics for insights and automation, and unlock seamless service for every customer.
While other AI tools get stale or require costly consultants to maintain, Front AI keeps learning from your team — using new customer interactions every day to power more accurate automation over time.
Join us tomorrow, July 16th, at Control Shift to learn more about Front’s approach to AI and live demos of all our new features.
Written by Paul Teyssier
Originally Published: 15 July 2025