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Plain

SUPPORT
Velocity8.8

API-first customer support platform for B2B SaaS teams consolidating Slack, email, and in-app messages into one inbox

www.plain.com ↗

Plain built an autonomous support agent, and has now built the controls to trust it.

customer-supportai-agentsmcpagent-governanceworkflow-automation
◆Current state
Plain's changelog is dated entries with no titles, and nearly all of it concerns two AI surfaces: Ari, the customer-facing responder, and Sidekick, the internal agent. Sidekick spent July gaining reach — its own full-page home, reusable workspace skills, and connection to arbitrary MCP servers. The newest release turns to Ari and adds what was missing around it: a way to test it before customers see it, provenance behind each answer, configurable tone, and explicit escalation rules.
◆Where it's heading
The sequence reads as capability first, then governance. Plain rebuilt Ari into an agentic first responder, opened Sidekick to any MCP server, and let teams write skills the whole workspace shares — all of which widen what the agents can do and reach. The current release closes the loop the other way, making that autonomy inspectable and bounded before it is switched on. That is the order support-AI vendors have to complete in: teams will not put an agent in front of customers on capability claims alone.
◆Prediction
With testing and provenance in place, the next step is likely measurement — resolution and escalation rates per skill, or per-answer quality review feeding back into the skills teams write. The entries are short summaries linking off-site, so per-release depth is limited.

◆Recent moves

  1. 1d ago

    Test Ari before customers see it, with per-answer proof

    ⚡ SPARK

    After a quarter spent widening what Ari and Sidekick can do, this release is about constraining it: dry-run testing, per-answer proof, tone shaping, and explicit escalation rules. It is the enterprise-readiness half of the agentic bet Plain made in the spring.

    View source ↗
  2. 15d ago

    Import past conversations from any tool, no built-in importer

    Conversation history can be imported from any prior tool, including in-house systems, without waiting for a purpose-built importer. Migration friction is what keeps support teams on an incumbent, so this is a switching-cost removal aimed squarely at displacement.

    View source ↗
  3. 21d ago

    Sidekick connects to any MCP server

    ⚡ SPARK

    Sidekick's reach stopped being bounded by Plain's own integration roadmap. Together with skills two days earlier, it set up the autonomy that the August release then had to make governable.

    View source ↗
  4. 23d ago

    Sidekick gains reusable, workspace-shared skills

    ⚡ SPARK

    Skills turned Sidekick from a per-session assistant into a store of team procedure. It is the piece that makes the workspace, not the model, the thing a team would be reluctant to leave.

    View source ↗
  5. 28d ago

    Share published workflows by link

    Published workflows get shareable links that open as an editable draft in someone else's editor. Small, but it makes workflows a thing teams pass around rather than rebuild.

    View source ↗
  6. 1mo ago

    Sidekick gets its own full-page home and tool controls

    Sidekick moves to the top of the sidebar with a full page for starting sessions, watching running ones, and managing which tools it can reach. Placing tool controls here is the first sign of the governance work the August Ari release built out properly.

    View source ↗