How Givebutter Uses AI to Handle 60% of Support Tickets
Givebutter's support team now uses AI to deflect 60% of inbound requests, here's how they pulled it off!
Sunny Ellis runs support at Givebutter, a fundraising platform that’s helped nonprofits process over $5 billion in donations.
Because most Givebutter users aren’t technical, support is core to the mission. Sunny’s team now uses AI to deflect 60% of inbound requests, and we wanted to learn how they pulled it off.
Here are the highlights from our conversation.
Automating the easy 60%
Givebutter’s support team has scaled from five to thirty people in just four years. But their biggest productivity boost actually came from automation.
“We’re deflecting about 60% of our inbound conversations right now with AI.”
Sunny’s team uses Intercom’s Fin to automatically handle repetitive questions like “How do I log in?” or “Where’s my receipt?” Those tickets never reach a human anymore.
This lets them respond to customers faster, and frees up more time for human support agents to focus on complex or emotional issues that actually do need human judgment.
Fix your docs
Before adopting AI, Sunny realized the success of any automation depends on one thing: clean, accurate documentation.
“If your documentation isn’t organized or complete, get that in order first. It’s only as good as what you feed it.”
The Givebutter team overhauled their help center before introducing Fin. Every article was reviewed, rewritten, and updated. That investment paid off. Fin could be set up in minutes and has proven much more reliable when serving customers.
AI doesn’t replace empathy
Sunny’s hiring philosophy shifted after bringing AI into the workflow. With automation handling the simple questions, the remaining tickets are tougher and more emotionally charged.
“By the time a conversation gets past AI, it’s complex. So we hire for empathy and critical thinking, not just tech skills.”
The team’s north star: let AI take care of efficiency, and let humans take care of connection.
Building internal copilots with Claude
Beyond customer deflection, Sunny is now vibe-coding with Claude to power internal tools for her support agents.
She's been building an internal answer bot that centralizes information from multiple sources and helps agents find context faster.
Agents even use it to draft responses when they’re tired or dealing with frustrated customers.
Advice for support leaders getting started with AI
Sunny’s biggest advice for teams experimenting with AI: don’t aim for perfection.
“The first few hundred iterations might not be great. It’s a never-ending process.”
Start with your documentation, launch small, and keep refining. Each improvement compounds.
Key takeaways for support teams
- Clean your docs before adding AI. This will hugely impact how useful the tools are.
- Automate deflection first. It delivers the fastest ROI.
- Hire for empathy and problem-solving. AI can handle the rest.
- Treat AI deployment like an ongoing project, not a one-time thing.
Support at Givebutter isn’t becoming less human. If anything it’s becoming more human. AI handles the repetitive tasks so people can focus on care, nuance, and empathy.
We had a really great time jamming with Sunny! You can catch our full conversation on YouTube, alongside our previous conversations with product and engineering leaders at Intercom, Monday.com, Vercel, and more.