We think support teams should choose their own AI agent. Not have one chosen for them by their platform.

Today, we're making that real: Bring Your Own Agent lets you connect any AI agent to Plain's infrastructure, alongside or instead of ours.

The principle

Look at how most support platforms work today. They build a proprietary AI agent, couple it tightly to their infrastructure, and optimize everything around keeping you inside their ecosystem.

The switching costs aren't a bug. They're the business model.

We think that's the wrong approach. Not because those agents are bad, but because it puts the platform's interests ahead of the customer's.

If your AI agent decision is dictated by your platform choice, that's not a real decision. And if switching agents means rebuilding your entire support operation, you're not going to switch, even when you should.

We'd rather build infrastructure that's good enough that teams stay because they want to, not because leaving is too painful.

That's the bet behind Bring Your Own Agent.

What we built

Bring Your Own Agent lets you connect any AI agent to Plain. Parahelp, Sierra, Decagon, Fin, Decimal. Whatever agent you've built or bought, it works with Plain.

Your agent handles the conversations. Plain handles everything around it: thread routing, queue management, escalation paths, SLAs, and the handoff between AI and your team.

Here's how it works:

You create a machine user in Plain to represent your agent. Your agent subscribes to webhooks (thread created, new messages, status changes) and responds to threads via our API. As your agent works, it updates thread status, and Plain's infrastructure takes care of the rest.

Your agent's activity appears under Plain AI → Activity, where you get a clear view of every thread your agent has touched, basic performance stats, and a breakdown by agent status. Meanwhile, your human-centric queues (My Threads, Needs First Response, Needs Next Response) stay focused on the work that actually needs a person. AI-handled threads are filtered out automatically so your team isn't wading through noise.

The full setup guide is in our help center.

In practice

Teams are already connecting their own agents to Plain.

Mintlify tried a lot of support tools before landing on Plain. None gave them enough flexibility to run a third-party AI agent the way they wanted.

"Plain is the only reason we can run a third-party AI support agent at all. We tried a lot of other support tools, and none came close to this level of flexibility. Machine users unlock everything — from external agents to custom prioritization and workflows."

— Dean Sliney, Founding Support Engineer at Mintlify

Tines had a different problem. They'd already built an AI agent that worked — Intercom's Fin, tuned over months to match their tone and handle their customers' questions. They didn't want to replace it. They wanted to run it everywhere. So they used Plain as the infrastructure layer, Tines as the orchestration layer, and kept Fin as the brain.

"Bringing Fin into Plain meant we could roll it out across Slack, MS Teams, and any future channel without starting over. And once I got deeper into the handover process from AI agents to humans, it became so smooth and easy it was a no-brainer."

— Lasse Høgsholt, Senior Technical Support Engineer at Tines

Neither team had to compromise on their AI agent to get the infrastructure they needed. And if they decide to switch agents next quarter, they can.

Why it matters

The AI agent market is moving fast. New agents, new capabilities, new entrants. The landscape shifts quarterly. That's fine. That's healthy. It means the technology is getting better.

What's not fine is being stuck. Locked into one agent because your platform won't let you use another without starting over. That's not a technology problem. It's a trust problem. It means the platform is optimizing for retention, not for your success.

We wanted to build the opposite of that.

Bring Your Own Agent means your channels, your queues, your workflows, your escalation paths all stay the same no matter which agent you're running. The agent is a layer you can change. The infrastructure persists.

You evaluate agents on merit. You switch when something better comes along. You build a stack that fits your team's needs, not your vendor's.

What about Plain's own AI?

It's still here, and we're still investing in it. Plain AI is purpose-built for our infrastructure. It understands thread context, routing logic, and escalation paths natively, which means it works out of the box with zero integration overhead.

But we made it optional, deliberately. Because the best AI agent for your team is the one that actually performs best for your team, and we'd rather you choose that than be stuck with ours by default.

Use Plain AI on its own. Run it alongside a third-party agent. Or bring your own and skip ours entirely. Your call, and we mean that. 😊

Get started

Check out the full setup guide to connect your agent to Plain. If you have questions, we're around. Reach out to our team anytime.