What this automation does
Every week, AI reviews your recently resolved support tickets, clusters them by topic, and identifies questions that come up repeatedly but don't have a knowledge base article yet. It then drafts a complete article for each topic — title, summary, step-by-step instructions, and common variations of the question.
A human reviews and publishes the drafts. Over time, your knowledge base grows organically based on what customers actually ask, not what you think they'll ask.
Tools you need
- Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Help Scout: Your support platform with ticket export capabilities
- OpenAI API or Claude API: For analyzing tickets and drafting articles ($0.10-0.30 per batch)
- n8n or Make: Scheduled weekly workflow to pull tickets and generate articles
- Notion or your CMS: Where draft articles are stored for review
How to set it up
Step 1: Set up a weekly scheduled workflow in n8n or Make. Pull all resolved tickets from the past week via your helpdesk API. Export the ticket subject, conversation, resolution, and tags.
Step 2: Send the batch to OpenAI or Claude with a prompt asking it to: (1) group tickets by topic, (2) count how many tickets per topic, (3) identify topics with 3+ tickets that don't have an existing KB article.
Step 3: For each identified topic, generate a draft article with: a clear title (phrased as a question), a one-paragraph answer, step-by-step instructions if applicable, and 2-3 alternate phrasings of the question for SEO.
Step 4: Save drafts to Notion or your CMS as unpublished drafts. Send a weekly Slack notification listing the new drafts for your team to review, edit, and publish.
Cost breakdown
| Item | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| n8n (self-hosted) | $0 | Free and open source |
| OpenAI API | $10-$30/mo | Weekly batch processing |
| Notion | Free-$10/mo | For storing drafts |
| Total monthly | $10-$40/mo | Builds your KB automatically |
Frequently asked questions
Manual KB articles take 30-60 minutes each to write. AI drafts take 5 minutes to review and edit. You'll produce 4-5x more articles per week while spending less total time. Plus the AI surfaces topics you might not have thought to write about.
AI drafts are 80-90% ready. You'll need to verify accuracy, add screenshots or links, and polish the tone. Plan 5-10 minutes of editing per article. Don't publish without human review — AI occasionally gets details wrong.