The short version: Bring your five hardest real tickets to every demo. Then check what the agent knows before it starts, what it can actually do in your tools, where it works, how it hands off to your team, and what it costs when your ticket volume doubles. The best demo isn't the slickest one. It's the one that handles your tickets.
Every support tool calls itself agentic now. The demos all look great.
The hard part is figuring out what happens on a normal Tuesday, with your tickets, your customers, and your messy systems. This is the checklist we'd use if we were buying.
Before you take any demo, pull five tickets from last month. Pick the ones that took your team the longest.
Maybe it's "Why did our export fail?" from a big account. Or "When was this user removed?" where someone had to dig through logs for half an hour.
Bring those to every demo. Ask the vendor to walk through them live. You'll learn more in 20 minutes than from any slide.
A chatbot starts with your help center. An agent should start with the customer.
Ask what the agent can see on a new ticket. Good answers sound like this:
If the answer is "it reads your knowledge base," that's a chatbot with a new name. That's fine for simple questions. It won't help much with the hard ones.
Answering is the easy part. The real time sink is the work around the answer.
Ask the vendor to show the agent doing things in your other tools:
Then ask the follow-up: can you control what it's allowed to do? You want to pick which actions need a human to approve first. "It can do anything" is not a feature.
If you support businesses, a lot of your customers probably aren't using a chat bubble on your website.
They're in a shared Slack channel. Or Microsoft Teams. Or email, with three people from their team on the thread.
Ask which channels the agent works in today. Then ask if it's the same agent in every channel, with the same context, or a separate bot for each one.
(If most of your customers live in shared channels, we wrote more about that in Slack-first support for B2B teams.)
Every agent will hit something it can't solve. That's normal. What matters is what your team gets when it does.
The bad version: a ticket that says "Customer needs help," and your engineer starts from zero.
The good version: a short summary of what the customer asked, what the agent checked, what it found, and what it suggests doing next. Your person picks it up in two minutes instead of thirty.
Ask to see a real handoff. Not a mockup.
Your product changes every week. Your support process changes with it.
So ask who can update the agent's instructions. If every tweak needs an engineer, or a ticket to the vendor, it'll fall behind fast.
The best setups let the people closest to the work write instructions in plain English and share them with the whole team. Ask to see someone edit one live.
You wouldn't ship code without testing it. Same goes here.
Ask if you can run the agent on past tickets and see what it would have said. Ask if you can try a change on a small slice of tickets before turning it on for everyone.
If the only way to test is "turn it on and watch," that's a risk you're taking on.
This one gets skipped in a lot of demos. Don't skip it.
Pricing usually falls into a few buckets:
None of these is wrong. But do the math with your real numbers.
Take your monthly ticket volume. Now double it, because that's where you hope to be. What does the bill look like then? If the cost climbs every time a customer writes in, a busy month gets expensive fast.
Agents touch a lot of sensitive stuff. Ask the boring questions early.
If a vendor gets vague here, that tells you something.
Here's one people forget. The same context that helps support is useful to everyone else, too.
Sales wants to know what's going on with an account before a call. Customer success wants to spot a renewal at risk. Product wants to know which bugs keep coming up.
Ask if those teams can ask the agent questions too, ideally in a tool they already use, like Slack. If the answer is yes, the value goes way beyond your ticket queue.
Score each vendor from 1 to 5 on each question, using your five real tickets.
| Question | What a 5 looks like |
|---|---|
| Context | Knows the account, history, and related bugs before it starts |
| Actions | Does real work in your tools, with approval controls you set |
| Channels | Same agent across Slack, Teams, email, chat, and more |
| Handoff | Hands your team a summary, what it checked, and a next step |
| Editing | Your support team can update instructions in plain English |
| Testing | You can run it on past tickets before going live |
| Pricing | Cost stays predictable as ticket volume grows |
| Security | SOC 2 Type II, data residency options, audit logs, scoped access |
| Reach | Other teams can use the same context, not just support |
Add it up. The highest score with your tickets wins, not the slickest demo.
We built Pylon around this exact list, because it's what we needed for our own support team.
Pylon is the agentic support platform built for B2B. Agents start with the account's history, work in Slack, Microsoft Teams, email, chat, and more, and connect to the tools your team already uses. Your team writes Skills in plain English to teach agents how you work.
Pricing is seats plus agentic credits, not per ticket. Committed credit packages start at 5,000 credits, and pay-as-you-go is available when it's enabled for your account.
Pylon is used by 1,500+ B2B companies. Some teams, like Sardine and Wispr Flow, support both business and consumer customers in one place.
Want the backstory? Here's how our own team adopted agentic support. If you're still sorting out the basics, start with agentic support vs AI chatbots. Current product and pricing details are on the Pylon facts page.
Test it on your own hardest tickets. Watch what the agent knows before it starts, what it can actually do, and what your team gets when it hands off.
A chatbot answers questions, usually from your help center. An agentic platform uses customer context and connected tools to investigate and take action, then brings in a person when judgment is needed.
Not on day one. Most teams start with the agent investigating and drafting while a person reviews. As trust grows, they let it handle more on its own, one workflow at a time.
Model your real ticket volume, then double it. Compare what each pricing model costs at both numbers. Per-resolution and per-conversation pricing grow with volume. Seats and credits tend to be easier to predict.
A few weeks is usually enough. Run each vendor on the same set of real tickets so you're comparing apples to apples.
Pylon charges for seats plus agentic credits, not per ticket. Committed credit packages start at 5,000 credits. Pay-as-you-go is available when it's turned on for your account. See pricing.
Pylon Workforce Management is available now. See it in action with a live demo.
