Sharing how we're using Slack side conversations, plus one problem I'm hoping someone can confirm or work around.
What we've built
Our technical support team has a private internal Slack channel with an always-on AI agent sitting in it (built on Claude, running in our own agent framework). There's no trigger word or slash command — you just start a new thread in the channel and the agent replies in that thread. It has read access to our internal systems (Jira/Confluence, GitHub, Sentry, our own product data), so answers come back grounded in real context rather than generic. It's become the fastest way for the team to get a sanity check mid-ticket.
From Intercom, we can open a Slack side conversation on a ticket and post a question straight into that channel. That half works perfectly — the question lands, and the agent answers in the thread.
The gap
Only human replies flow back into the side conversation in Intercom. The agent's replies never appear. I'm assuming that's because they're posted by an app/bot rather than a user account, so they get filtered out of the sync.
My questions
1. Is that the expected behavior — are bot/app messages deliberately excluded from the Slack side conversation sync?
2. Is there any setting or workaround to include them? The only option I can think of is having the agent post with a user token instead of as an app, which we'd rather avoid.
And if it isn't possible today, consider this a feature request: an opt-in option to include bot/app messages in the sync, ideally scoped per channel or via an allowlist of specific apps/bot users so you're not pulling in noise from every other integration in the channel.
Why it matters
Right now someone has to manually copy the agent's answer back into Intercom, or the answer just lives in Slack and never makes it onto the ticket. If bot replies synced, the whole troubleshooting trail — question, AI context, human follow-up — would sit on the conversation where the rest of the team can see it. For anyone pairing an internal AI agent with Intercom support, this is the one link in the chain that's broken.