Ari

Ari is the customer facing AI agent built into Plain.

It answers what it can from your Knowledge Sources, and hands off to your team the moment it is unsure, before one of your customers has to ask twice.

No flow builder. No decision trees. No bot looping people in circles. Turn Ari on, point it at your knowledge, and it starts handling support out of the box

1. Resolves the routine instantly, around the clock

2. Knows when to step back, and hands off to a human before a customer gets frustrated

3. Answers only from your knowledge, so its responses stay grounded in what you've told it

4. Works out of the box, no building required

What can Ari see?

When handling a request, Ari sees the conversation, basic customer details (name, company), and the channel. This context helps it understand the request and what state it is in, but Ari uses your Knowledge Sources to answer customer questions.

Attachments

Ari can read files a customer attaches to their message, so a screenshot, log file, or document becomes part of what it understands about the request.

What Ari can read:

• Images → PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP

• Documents → PDF, Word, RTF, OpenDocument, Pages

• Spreadsheets → Excel, CSV, TSV, Google Sheets

• Presentations → PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides

• Text → Plaintext, Markdown, HTML, source code, config files, emails

Limits:

• Only files the customer attaches are read, not files your team or Ari send

• Up to 10 files per request; anything beyond that is ignored

• Each file must be under 2.5 MB

• Audio, video, and archives (e.g. .zip) can't be read

• Ari only reads files uploaded directly to the conversation, it does not follow links to externally hosted files (Google Drive, Dropbox, etc)

Thread Fields

You can optionally let Ari see the Thread Fields of a support request, for additional context.

This is controlled per field and is off by default. To enable this for a given field:

1. Head to Settings → Thread Fields

2. Open a field

3. Enable "Include in Agent context"

Only the fields you explicitly enable are shared with Ari. We apply some filtering and limits:

• Fields are sorted alphabetically by label and capped at 25

• Values are shortened to 150 characters and descriptions to 200

• If we fail to load the thread fields, Ari continues without them

Adding dynamic context

Allowing Ari to understand data that sits within your own systems as part of the context it uses when answering customer questions makes Ari far more powerful.

You can achieve this via Thread Fields that are populated via Plain's GraphQL and webhooks, an automated Workflow, or manually setting the field.