About AI Answers, Beacons, and AI Agents

AI Answers in Help Scout works across three interconnected pieces: the Beacon widget your customers interact with, the AI Answers settings inside that Beacon, and the AI Agent that powers the experience behind the scenes. Here's how they fit together.

About Beacon

Beacon is the chat widget that lives on your website or in your product. Depending on your settings, when a customer clicks it, they can search your Docs content, reach out to your team, and get answers from AI Answers without ever waiting for a human reply.

Beyond AI Answers, Beacon can also display proactive messages, notifications, and surveys (see Get Started With Messages), and allows you to offer live chat for your customers (see Get Started With Live Chat for more there).

Each Beacon is configured separately, so you can have different Beacons for whatever you might need a different Beacon for — different parts of your site or product, for different websites, or for different languages, each with its own settings.

More about Beacon in general is here: Get Started With Beacon

AI Answers Settings in Beacon

AI Answers is toggled on and off at the Beacon level. When it's enabled, your customers will see the AI Answers experience when they open the Beacon.

The AI Answers section of your Beacon settings is where you control how AI Answers behaves in that specific Beacon — like adding suggested questions that will show as a button your contacts can click to ask that question, enabling satisfaction ratings, capturing an email address from a visitor, and the specific text that AI Answers on this Beacon should use in certain circumstances.

You'll find these settings in Manage > Beacons > [Choose Your Beacon] > Edit Beacon > AI Answers.

One of the key settings here is which AI Agent the Beacon uses — but we'll get to that in the next section.

AI Agents

The AI Agent is where you define what AI Answers actually knows and how it presents itself to customers. Think of the Beacon as the front door and the AI Agent as everything behind it — the knowledge, the tone, the name your customers see.

Inside an AI Agent, you can configure:

• Knowledge — Add any knowledge source your agent needs to know to answer questions. Your Docs site, an external knowledge base, public websites, PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, and more. AI Answers will be able to use any knowledge that's added to the agent that's set on the Beacon.

  
  

  

  
  

• Identity — Identity is where you define who your AI Agent is. Use it to establish the tone, style, and general approach it takes when talking to customers. You can give it direction about your brand's voice, how formal or conversational it should be, and what kinds of things it should or shouldn't do in general.

  
  

  

  
  

• Improvements — Use Improvements to shape and correct the answers that your AI Agent sources. Add bits of information that isn't explicitly covered in your knowledge base or sources, correct an answer that didn't quite get things right, or direct the contact to reach out to your team.

  
  

  

  
  

A single AI Agent can be connected to multiple Beacons, which is useful if you want consistent AI Answers behavior across different parts of your product without managing it in multiple places. Conversely, if different Beacons need to serve different audiences or draw on different knowledge, you can create separate AI Agents for each.

You'll find AI Agents in Manage > AI Agents.

How it All Fits Together

When you have AI Answers enabled and a customer opens your Beacon and asks a question, here's what's happening:

The Beacon surfaces the AI Answers experience →

AI Answers calls on the connected AI Agent →

the AI Agent uses its configured knowledge and identity to respond.

If you want to change what AI Answers knows or how it presents itself, that's done in the AI Agent — not the Beacon.

If you want to control whether AI Answers appears for a particular audience or context, that's done in the Beacon settings.