How can we help?

Articles in this section

All About AI Chat in ServiceAI

Ricky Cecchini
  • Updated

This article replaces the previous "AI Chat Sandbox" article. The standalone Sandbox has been retired and folded into the main AI Chat experience that now opens as your home page when you sign in to ServiceAI.

AI Chat is the primary way you work with ServiceAI. It is where you ask questions about your tickets, agents, companies, and knowledge base, draft responses, investigate similar tickets, and pull web context — all through a chat interface that pulls live data from your PSA and knowledge base on demand.

This article covers how AI Chat is organized, the difference between Agent and User personas, how related sources are surfaced, and how AI Chat differs from Ask Orion.

AI Chat Is Your Home Page

When you sign in to ServiceAI, you land directly in AI Chat. There is no separate dashboard step in front of it and no separate Sandbox tab — the chat surface itself is the workspace.

From here you can start a new conversation, jump back into a recent one from the sidebar, or use the AI Chat dropdown on a ticket to begin a conversation already anchored to that ticket's context.

Chat Quick Actions

The prompt buttons on the chat home page are now Chat Quick Actions — a customizable, per-tenant set of one-click prompts that launch a chat conversation with a chosen prompt pre-filled. Previously these buttons were hard-coded; now you can add, reorder, rename, and edit them to match the prompts your team actually uses every day.

The configuration model mirrors Pod Quick Actions: each action has a short button label and a longer prompt that is sent to AI Chat when the button is clicked. The defaults that ship with the May 2026 release are Show Flagged Tickets, Show Flagged Customers, and Show Security Alerts.

See Configuring Chat Quick Actions in ServiceAI for details on creating, reordering, and customizing the prompts shown on the chat home page.

Agent and User Personas

AI Chat has two personas, selectable from a segmented toggle at the top of the conversation:

  • Agent — for techs and admins working inside the platform. AI Chat in Agent mode follows your Agent Mode Rules (configured under Settings > Rules) and has access to internal tools like ticket lookup and similar-tickets search
  • User — for previewing what an end user would see. User mode follows your end-user-facing rules and tool policy, so you can validate the experience before sending users to the public chat

The toggle is visible on the home AI Chat page and on the Ticket Details AI Chat dropdown. Inside PSA pods embedded in Autotask and ConnectWise ticket pages, persona is locked to Agent and the toggle is hidden, since pod users there are always techs. The HaloPSA and Zendesk pods also default to Agent persona.

Persona-Aware Chat History

The left sidebar lists your recent conversations grouped by persona, so Agent conversations and User conversations stay separate. This keeps a quick experiment in User mode from cluttering your day-to-day Agent history, and lets you find the conversation you actually want.

Sidebar lists cap at five items with a "See more" expander to keep the navigation compact.

Each Conversation Has Its Own URL

Every AI Chat conversation gets its own URL. Refreshing the page returns you to the same conversation rather than starting a new one, and you can bookmark or share a conversation URL the same way you would any other ServiceAI page.

Tool-Driven Workflow

AI Chat does not answer from the model alone. For each turn, it decides which tools to call based on what you asked, then uses the results to ground its response. The tools available in Agent mode include:

  • KB search — semantic search across your knowledge base articles
  • Ticket lookup — pull a specific ticket by number from your PSA
  • Similar tickets — find historically similar tickets to a description or to the current ticket
  • Web search — pull current information from the public web when your own data does not cover the question
  • Auto-fetch from PSA — when you reference a ticket, company, or user, AI Chat will pull the latest record from your PSA without you having to paste it

You will see these calls reflected in the Related Sources sidebar as the response is generated.

The right side of AI Chat shows a Related Sources panel listing every source consulted for the current response — KB articles, similar tickets, web pages, and direct PSA records. Each source includes:

  • A filter pill showing the source type, so you can narrow the list to just tickets or just KB articles
  • A score pill showing how strongly it matched the question, so you can see at a glance whether the response is well-grounded

Click a source to open the underlying ticket, article, or web page in a new tab.

File Attachments

You can drop files into the chat input — screenshots, log files, exported tickets — and AI Chat will use the contents as part of the next turn. This is useful for analyzing error output, comparing two configurations, or asking about a vendor email that was forwarded to you.

Slash Commands

Type / in the chat input to open the slash-command menu. Built-in commands include:

  • /clear — start a fresh conversation without losing the current one from your history

You can also configure custom slash commands for your tenant. These are useful for one-click prompts your team runs often, such as "summarize this ticket for a customer-facing reply."

Ticket-Anchored AI Chat

On the Ticket Details page in ServiceAI, the AI Chat button is a dropdown with two options:

  • Agent mode — opens AI Chat with the ticket already loaded as context, in Agent persona
  • User mode — opens AI Chat with the ticket loaded, in User persona, to preview the end-user-facing response

This is the fastest way to get from a ticket to a grounded AI response without copying the ticket number or pasting the body. Inside the PSA pods (Autotask, ConnectWise, HaloPSA, Zendesk), the same context is loaded automatically and the persona is locked to Agent.

How AI Chat Differs From Ask Orion

ServiceAI has two distinct chat surfaces, and it is worth knowing which one to reach for:

  • AI Chat is the main workspace — the home page — where you work with your data. It looks up tickets, runs searches, drafts responses, and reads your KB. It is the surface that also powers the PSA pods and the public /chat?tenant=… route
  • Ask Orion is the right-side help blade, opened from the constellation icon in the top navigation. Ask Orion answers questions about the ServiceAI product itself — how a feature works, where a setting lives, what a screen does. It does not query your tickets, companies, or users

Use AI Chat when the question is about your data or your customers. Use Ask Orion when the question is about ServiceAI itself.

Related articles

Comments

0 comments

Article is closed for comments.