A step on a request, under your rules.
An AI support agent is software that can act on a support request under rules you set. The action might be an answer to the customer, a change to the ticket, or a pass to a person when the case should not be automated.
The word is doing a lot of work in the market. Some products mean a model with tools. Some mean a branded front door. Some mean a copilot that never sends anything alone. Ask what happens on a ticket when no person is watching.
A window is not the agent.
A chatbot that owns a conversation in its own window can be called an agent. It has not supported the desk until the ticket, and the system the ticket is about, show what was done.
A knowledge-base search is not an agent either. Returning an article is a retrieval step. An agent is the decision to use that article, and the write that follows, if a write is what the case needed.
Finish, price, and fit.
Finish means where the work ends: the customer message, the ticket status, or the record in the system of record. Price means the unit you are billed on, and whether that unit is published. Fit means the desk you already run, not the inbox a vendor would prefer you to adopt.
When another vendor is the better choice, the page should say so. The buying guide walks the three tests. The compare pages apply them to named products, with dates on the claims.
Fluent and wrong is worse than a wait.
Ground the answer in a source a person can open, and keep a path to a person for the cases the agent should not close. A confident reply with nothing behind it is not a finished job.
Do not read a demo on a sample ticket as proof. The proof that matters is a baseline on your own queue, and a review after the agent has been allowed to act.