Do I need to integrate all my tools before starting?
No, and it is better not to. With the documentation indexed you already resolve the group of questions that do not depend on the account, and that works on day one with nothing connected. Integrations get added in order of what gets asked most, and normally two or three cover the bulk: subscription state, usage, and the last order or invoice.
Short answer
No, and it is better not to. With the documentation indexed you already resolve the group of questions that do not depend on the account, and that works on day one with nothing connected. Integrations get added in order of what gets asked most, and normally two or three cover the bulk: subscription state, usage, and the last order or invoice.
In detail
How to decide the order
From the history, not from intuition. Classify a hundred real conversations by which fact would have been needed to answer them: an ordered list falls out, and there is usually one integration resolving three times what the others do. That is the first.
Why connecting everything at once goes badly
Because every integration is surface that has to be decided: what gets read, what does not, what can be written. Doing it with six at once leads to deciding badly out of fatigue, and decisions made that way are the ones that later produce strange answers.
What is not needed
General access to your database. What gets connected are specific queries you expose, not a master key. If a vendor asks for the second, the conversation has become one about security rather than support.
Terms that come up here
Other questions in this thread
How long does it take to get an AI support agent running?
Answering from your documentation is a matter of hours, not weeks: what you already publish gets indexed and it starts replying. What takes time is the other half — connecting the reads against your API so it can check the account of whoever is asking — and that depends on your product team, not the vendor. One to two weeks is an honest estimate for having both.
Do I need a help centre already to use an AI knowledge base?
No. The articles can live anywhere readable — a portal, a docs repository, even internal documents — and the system indexes them the same. What is required is that they exist in writing: if the answer is nowhere, there is nothing to index, and that is the only real prerequisite.
Do I need the official WhatsApp Business API to support customers there?
Yes, if you want to handle it with a team or with an automated system. The normal app and WhatsApp Business do not allow tools to be connected in any supported way, and the workarounds that manage it risk having Meta shut the number down. The official API is contracted through an authorised provider, who handles the verification.
Where this question comes from
Integrations →