Most teams introduce AI to customer support at the wrong end. They point it at the outbox: draft the reply, send the reply, close the ticket. It's the most visible part of the job, so it feels like the most valuable part to automate. It isn't. The expensive part of running a support inbox isn't writing answers. It's the twenty seconds of context-gathering that happens before every answer — who is this, what did they buy, what did we tell them last time, is this the fourth per