AI features

opendesk’s AI helps agents write and understand faster, and can answer customers in chat and email from your knowledge. Everything the AI does shows up as Ollie. It is optional: an admin can turn it off for the workspace, and a self-hosted instance only has it when its operator configures a provider.

Admins set it up in Settings, AI.

1. Use AI in this workspace: turns every AI feature on or off for everyone. Nothing is sent to the provider while it is off.
2. Let teammates ask Ollie: the assistant in the top bar.
3. Automatic: features that run without anyone asking. Triage new tickets, Keep summaries up to date (tickets with five or more messages) and Let Ollie answer chats. All three are off by default.
4. Cost pills: about what one call costs on the models you chose. See AI usage on Cloud.

Turn on AI

1. Open Settings, AI

   Click Settings at the bottom of the sidebar, then AI.

   

2. Switch on what you want

   Turn on Use AI in this workspace, then choose which features run on their own. Changes save as you make them.

3. Set how drafts sound

   Under Writing, pick the Tone (friendly, professional, concise, or your own words), the Reply language (the customer’s, or the workspace’s), and any Instructions drafts should follow, such as policies.

   

4. Choose the models

   The Main model writes drafts, summaries, answers, articles and Ollie’s replies. The Fast model handles rewrites, translation and decisions. Every model is available on every plan; on Cloud a pricier model uses more of the AI balance.

   

Write with AI

In the reply box of a ticket, click AI to draft or rework a reply. Nothing is sent until you send it.

1. AI: opens the menu.
2. Draft a reply writes one from the conversation, the contact, your saved replies and the most relevant help articles, citing its sources. Draft with instructions lets you say what to write.
3. Rewrite your draft: friendlier, more formal, shorter, longer, fix spelling and grammar, or simpler. Translate turns it into another language.

On any message, Translate shows it in your language. Ollie’s section on the ticket summarizes it and answers questions about it; see Ollie on a ticket.

The AI agent for chat and email

The AI agent answers customers for you: chat visitors in the widget and, if you choose, emails to a mailbox. It answers from your help center and the knowledge you add, can use your own tools, and hands the conversation to your team when it should. It answers as a bot: Ollie by default, or bots you build with their own name, face and personality, one per widget or address if you like.

It has its own section in settings, under AI agent.

1. Overview: how the agent did over a date range.
2. Bots, Behaviour, Knowledge, Tools, Playground and Tests: who answers, and everything that shapes its answers.
3. Setup checklist: the steps left before the agent is ready. It collapses once they are done.
4. Numbers: conversations, how many were resolved without a person, handoffs, how visitors rated answers, and what it spent.
5. Needs review: answers visitors rated not helpful, and conversations it handed off, from the last 30 days. Improve answer writes the better answer, which the agent uses from then on.

Set up the agent

1. Turn it on and tell it who it is

   In AI agent, Behaviour, turn on Let the agent answer chats. Under Bots, open a bot to give it a name, a face and a personality, and write its Instructions like a note to a new teammate: your products, plans, policies, opening hours and useful links. See Bots.

   

2. Set its limits

   Further down, choose the Agent model, how many Replies per conversation it gives before handing off, Topics to decline, a Monthly spending cap, and whether to Ask for an email before handing off.

   

3. Add knowledge

   Published help center articles are always part of its knowledge. In AI agent, Knowledge, Add knowledge adds more: a website it crawls, a file, or a short Q&A snippet.

   

4. Connect tools, if you have them

   In AI agent, Tools, Connect a server adds your own MCP server, so the agent can look up an order or update an address for a visitor. Choose which tools it may use. A tool that changes something asks the visitor to confirm first.

   

5. Try it in the playground

   AI agent, Playground lets you chat with the agent as a visitor would. Nothing reaches a customer or creates a ticket. On the side, pick which bot answers and try other settings without saving them.

   

Good to know

Tests keeps saved conversations and what each answer must do, such as mention something, hand off, or use a tool. Run them after you change instructions, knowledge or tools to see what broke. A run costs what its answers cost, like the playground.

Chat answers

With chat answers on, the agent replies to every visitor message in a conversation it is handling, labelled as AI, citing the articles and pages it used. A visitor can always choose Talk to a person.

1. Actions: when a tool would change something, the visitor sees what will happen and confirms or declines. An action not answered in 15 minutes lapses.
2. Improve answer (admins): write the answer it should have given. It is saved as a Q&A snippet and used at once.
3. Handoff: the agent hands off when the visitor asks for a person, when it cannot help, or after its reply limit. The assignee or team is notified.

The agent stops answering a conversation as soon as a teammate replies or it is assigned. It stays silent, leaving the conversation to your team, when AI is off, the AI balance is used up, or its monthly cap is reached.

Email answers

Each mailbox can let the agent answer its email. It is off by default. Open Settings, Mailboxes, choose a mailbox, and turn on Ollie answers emails to this mailbox. Bot picks which bot writes and signs the emails.

• Draft for review leaves a suggested reply on the ticket. A teammate sends it with one click, edits it, or discards it.
• Send automatically replies by email on its own.
• Only outside business hours leaves the email to your team while you are open.

Note

Spam, auto-replies, mailing lists, no-reply senders and mail from your own team are never answered. The agent sends at most 5 emails or suggestions per customer an hour, and marks its email as automatic so autoresponders don’t answer it. When it can’t help, nothing is sent and the ticket waits for your team, unassigned.

Triage

Triage reads a new ticket and decides its priority, severity, labels, team, the customer’s sentiment (positive, neutral, negative or frustrated), the language and a category. When the instance has the decision model, each decision comes with a confidence, such as “92% sure”: what is above the workspace’s threshold is applied and shows in the ticket’s activity as Ollie, and the rest becomes a suggestion on the ticket that an agent can Apply or Skip. Without it, your AI model makes the same decisions and they apply directly. Triage only ever raises a priority or severity.

Automations can run triage with the ai_triage action, match its result with sentiment and severity conditions, and ask Ollie a yes or no question with an ai_decide condition. See Triage and assignment and Automations.

Your own provider key

Owners and admins can run the workspace’s AI on their own key instead of the AI balance, in Settings, AI, Provider: choose Your own key, then an OpenRouter key, an Anthropic key, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (base URL and key).

• The key is checked with a small test call before it is saved, stored encrypted, and never shown again except its last 4 characters. An endpoint’s base URL must use HTTPS on a public address.
• Every AI request of the workspace then goes to your provider, and the model pickers list your provider’s models.
• Requests on your key cost $0 on opendesk and are never refused for the AI balance. They still appear in the usage report, marked as on your key.
• Search embeddings stay on opendesk at no charge. The decision model (triage and automation questions) stays on opendesk and costs a little from the AI balance.
• If your provider rejects the key or the account runs out of funds, AI features stop (they never fall back to the AI balance), admins get a notification, and the Provider section shows what happened. Replace the key, or remove it to go back to the AI balance.

AI usage on Cloud

On opendesk Cloud, AI is paid from the workspace’s AI balance, in US dollars: a monthly allowance, then any AI top-ups. Settings, AI shows what a typical call costs on the models you chose.

• Each call is charged on its real cost: what the provider charged for it, at the model’s list price, times 1.5.
• A pricier model, a longer thread or a longer answer costs more; a short one costs less.
• A call starts only when the balance covers its estimate: the prompt at the model’s input price plus the longest answer it may write (counted up to 4,000 tokens) at the output price, times 1.5, and at least $0.01.
• A failed request costs nothing. Search indexing is free.

Typical costs with the default models

With Claude Sonnet 5.5 as the main model and Claude Haiku 5.5 as the fast one:

Feature	Model	Typical cost
Rewrite	fast	$0.0004
Translate	fast	$0.0005
Triage (every question in one call)	fast	$0.00075
Summarize	main	$0.0135
Ask about a ticket	main	$0.018
Draft a reply	main	$0.0195
Chat answer, each model turn	main	$0.021
Email answer, each model turn	main	$0.0225
Ollie, each model turn	main	$0.024
Draft an article	main	$0.0465

The agent’s playground and test runs cost what their answers cost, about $0.021 a reply.

Model prices

What the default models cost as a Cloud workspace pays for them, per 1 million tokens (input / output), and for a typical draft reply (4,000 input and 500 output tokens). These follow the provider’s list price; Settings, AI shows the current prices.

Model	Per 1M tokens (in / out)	Typical draft reply
Claude Haiku 5.5 (default fast model)	$0.15 / $0.75	$0.001
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash	$0.225 / $0.90	$0.0014
GPT-5.6 Luna	$0.30 / $1.80	$0.0021
Gemini 3.8 Flash	$1.125 / $5.625	$0.0073
Claude Sonnet 5.5 (default model)	$3 / $15	$0.0195
GPT-5.6 Sol	$3 / $15	$0.0195
Claude Opus 5.5	$6 / $30	$0.039

How your data is handled

• Each request sends the model only the data that feature needs.
• Customer content goes only to the provider the instance (or your own key) is configured with. Prompts and completions are not logged; usage records store counts only.
• Customer messages, articles and tool results are passed to the model as data, never as instructions, and model output is sanitized before it is shown or stored.

Self-hosting

Self-hosted instances have no AI balance: they use their own provider key. Set ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, or OPENAI_API_KEY with OPENAI_BASE_URL for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including local models through Ollama, vLLM or LM Studio. Add TYPESAFE_API_KEY to make triage decisions with the decision model, with calibrated confidence. See Self-hosting AI and the configuration reference.

Related

• Ollie, the assistant
• Bots
• Cloud plans and billing
• Knowledge base and help center
• AI API