Setting up your Knowledge for an AI-first support operation
How to set up Knowledge in Intercom so it works for Fin, your help center, and your team at the same time.
Setting up Knowledge in Intercom for the first time, the natural instinct is to treat it like a help center migration. But when you approach it as the foundation for an AI-first support operation, every piece of content you add pays off three times over. Here’s why.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you have the following in place.
- An Intercom workspace with admin access: You’ll need access to the Knowledge hub to follow along. Start a free trial at intercom.com if you don’t have one yet.
Video transcript
Traditionally, your knowledge base had one job, helping customers help themselves. But in an AI first support operation, it serves three audiences. The first is your team. It helps them answer questions in the inbox. The second is customers. They self serve using your help center without needing to reach out to your team. And the third, and this is the new one, is AI. Based on the same technology, one answers customer questions on your behalf called Fin, and the other assists your team in answering questions in the inbox called Copilot. These three audiences use the same knowledge layer you're about to set up. And when it's done with purpose, every piece you give adds triple the benefits. So the question becomes, what do you put in that layer and how? We know you're probably not starting from scratch and that your content likely lives somewhere else. This means you got two ways to bring it into Intercom, sync or import. With sync, your content stays where it is, and Intercom mirrors it. You're up and running fast, but updates take up to to 24 hours to reach Fin - and audience control is limited to the source level, not individual articles. With import, your content moves into Intercom, and you manage it all here. It takes more upfront work, but updates reach Fin almost instantly, and you get full audience control on every article. So which one should you start with? Well, it depends on your timeline and how you wanna manage content going forward. If you have the time to audit your content end to end before your operation goes live, then import. It's the cleanest starting point if you can do the upfront work. If you need to go live quickly, then sync. Fin starts working on day one, and you add native content alongside as you go for better control. So you're getting to the same place just gradually. A lot of teams also do a mix of both. They sync their existing content to get started, then create native articles and snippets for the things that matter most, like content that changes frequently or needs its own audience. So no matter which one you pick, it's important to audit your content before you start. This step is genuinely what accelerates our customers' success with Fin at the start of their journey. And one last thing before we wrap up on knowledge, audience targeting. Every article you create or import can be limited to a specific audience. Say you've got a troubleshooting article that only applies to customers on your pro plan. Audience targeting can be applied on a help center level, so you control who can find it and view the article in self serve. And on an AI Agent level, so you control when Fin or Copilot pulls from it. This matters quite a lot if you serve different types of customers, so it's worth thinking about upfront. Without this, Fin will pull from any published article and use it to answer absolutely everyone, and your team might have to spend extra time clarifying. So now you know how to set up knowledge in an AI-first support operation, how to bring it in, and who it's going to serve. Next, we're gonna look at which content to add first, so you launch with purpose rather than volume, then how to write it in a way that works for all three readers, customers, teammates, and AI.
Sync or import: choosing your path
The video walks through both options, but here’s how to make the call.
| Sync | Import | |
|---|---|---|
| What happens | Intercom mirrors your content. Updates from the source flow in automatically. | Content moves into Intercom once. You manage it here going forward. |
| Editing | In the source tool only. Read-only inside Intercom. | In Intercom. The connection to the source is severed. |
| Update speed | Up to 24 hours to reach Fin | Near-instant after publishing |
| Audience control | Source level only | Per article |
| Best for | Keeping your current tool as home base | Making Intercom your single source of truth |
Many teams do both: sync existing content to get started, then build native articles and snippets for content that needs tighter audience control or changes frequently, which is a major benefit of importing over syncing.
Audit before you add content
Whatever is in your existing knowledge comes across as-is: including outdated answers, articles that cover four topics at once, and content written for the wrong segment. All of it goes into what Fin reads from, so auditing before you connect isn’t about rewriting everything. It’s about knowing what’s there so you can decide what comes across now and what gets flagged for later.
Audience targeting: control who sees your content
This step matters most for teams with content written for different audiences, whether that’s by plan, region, or customer segment. It controls who can find and view articles in self-serve, and tells Fin and Copilot when to draw from a source based on who they’re talking to. Here’s how it works:
- Rules are built from People or Company attributes, for example Plan = Pro or Country = DE
- Multiple audiences on one piece of content use OR logic: Fin uses it if the customer matches any one of them
- Content without an audience rule defaults to Everyone
- Audience rules apply to new conversations only; existing conversations keep their original rules
- Set this up at Knowledge → [Article or Source] → Audience settings
| Note: If this is relevant to how you manage your knowledge, make sure you set this up before going live to keep Fin in control, as it may use any published content for every customer. |
