Move your team from Sierra to Forethought.
Each person gets a short interview, then a personalized step-by-step guide showing exactly where their saved work, prompts, and projects land in Forethought — and the few things that need a manual step, walked through. You send one invite; nobody becomes the help desk, and nothing in Sierra is changed or cancelled. Want to see where you’re paying for both first? Run the free audit.
Forethought AI Copilot surfaces real-time guidance — ticket summaries, reply drafts, KB article suggestions — as a sidebar inside Zendesk, Salesforce, and Freshworks while a human agent works a ticket. Sierra's Live Assist feature provides a similar real-time agent-assist overlay when a conversation is escalated from the Sierra AI agent to a live human agent. To migrate from Forethought Copilot to Sierra Live Assist: uninstall or disable the Forethought sidebar plugin in your helpdesk, route escalated conversations through Sierra's human handoff (which passes a structured conversation summary automatically), and enable Live Assist in Sierra's Agent Studio escalation settings. Agents receive conversation history and real-time suggestions within the Sierra-connected interface. To migrate from Sierra Live Assist to Forethought Copilot: deploy the Forethought helpdesk app, configure it to surface KB sources and draft replies; note that Forethought Copilot also handles tickets that were never handled by an AI agent first, making it broader in scope than Sierra's assist (which is post-escalation only).
- Warning: Forethought AI Copilot is available from Team plan upward, but deep AI insights (knowledge gap flags, advanced recommendation depth) are gated to Professional and Enterprise tiers. Sierra's Live Assist availability and configuration depth were not broken down by plan tier in public docs — confirm with Sierra sales before assuming full parity.
- Warning: Forethought Copilot works on tickets that originate natively in the helpdesk (Zendesk, Salesforce, Freshworks), not just escalated AI conversations. Sierra Live Assist is scoped specifically to conversations that passed through the Sierra agent first; human-initiated tickets that bypass Sierra receive no assist layer.
- Warning: Reply drafts generated by Forethought Copilot can be edited and sent directly from the helpdesk UI without switching screens. Sierra's documentation describes the overlay but does not confirm direct-send from within the agent's existing helpdesk tab — verify UX fit with your helpdesk configuration during a pilot.
Both Forethought Solve Agent and Sierra's omnichannel agent autonomously resolve customer issues without human intervention. To migrate from Forethought to Sierra: export your Autoflows and knowledge base articles from Forethought, then upload policy docs, SOPs, and past resolved transcripts into Sierra's Agent Studio for Ghostwriter to generate equivalent agent behaviors. Reconfigure channel coverage in Sierra (chat, phone, email, SMS, WhatsApp) from a single agent deployment rather than per-channel configs. To migrate from Sierra to Forethought: export conversation transcripts, rebuild escalation logic as Autoflows in Forethought, and connect the same knowledge sources via Forethought's native connectors. In both directions, re-test resolution flows end-to-end before cutover, as action-execution APIs (order lookup, refund processing) need to be re-pointed to back-end systems in the new platform.
- Warning: Forethought's channel coverage is plan-gated: chat/mobile on Team, email/voice/Slack only on Professional or Enterprise. Sierra's omnichannel deployment (58 languages, chat/phone/email/SMS/WhatsApp) is available without per-channel upsell, so teams on Forethought Team plan migrating to Sierra gain broader channel reach immediately, but the reverse migration may require a Forethought plan upgrade.
- Warning: Forethought Autoflows are a no-code workflow builder specific to its platform; Sierra uses Ghostwriter to generate agent logic from plain English or uploaded docs. There is no direct export format bridging the two, so workflow logic must be re-described in prose or re-uploaded as documents rather than migrated as structured configs.
- Warning: Sierra's voice capability is a separate Voice product add-on; confirm it is included in your Sierra contract before assuming parity with Forethought's Professional-tier voice support.
Forethought Discover Agent scans ticket history to identify recurring unanswered questions, KB gaps, and Autoflow automation opportunities, surfacing results in the Insights Dashboard with draft KB article and Autoflow suggestions. Sierra's Insights module (Explorer, Monitors, Experiments) lets teams query conversation history in natural language, automatically flag conversations needing review, and run A/B experiments on agent behavior changes. To migrate analytics workflows from Forethought to Sierra: export historical conversation data or reports from Forethought's Insights Dashboard, then configure Sierra Explorer with analogous natural-language queries to surface trend findings; set up Monitors to replicate gap-flagging logic. To migrate from Sierra to Forethought: configure the Forethought Discover Agent to scan inbound ticket corpora, then use its draft KB article and Autoflow suggestions to operationalize the gaps that Sierra Monitors were flagging. In both directions, re-run a representative month of conversation data through the new platform's insight tools before decommissioning the old system to validate that coverage patterns match.
- Warning: Forethought Discover's automated KB article and Autoflow gap generation is gated to Enterprise plan; Professional tier gets AI-surfaced insights only, without auto-generation. Sierra's Insights (Explorer, Monitors, Experiments) availability tier was not publicly documented — confirm scope with Sierra sales.
- Warning: Forethought Discover is specifically designed to recommend new Autoflow paths, which are platform-specific workflows. Migrating to Sierra means those recommended automations must be re-expressed as Sierra agent behaviors via Agent Studio, not directly imported.
- Warning: Sierra's Experiments tool supports multivariate A/B testing of agent behavior changes — there is no direct equivalent in Forethought's Discover Agent, which focuses on gap detection and content generation rather than controlled experimentation on live traffic.
Forethought offers 70+ pre-built connectors covering helpdesks (Zendesk, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Freshworks, Intercom), CRMs (HubSpot, Kustomer), knowledge bases (Confluence, Notion, Document360, Guru, SharePoint), call center platforms (Genesys, Amazon Connect, RingCentral, Five9), and e-commerce tools (Shopify). Sierra integrates with CRMs, order management systems, and data warehouses (Google Cloud, Databricks, Snowflake, Redis, AWS) via pre-built connectors and an Agent SDK. To migrate from Forethought to Sierra: audit your active Forethought integrations against Sierra's connector catalog in Agent Studio; pre-built helpdesk connectors (Zendesk, Salesforce) overlap, but Sierra does not document the same breadth of call center or knowledge base connectors publicly — use the Agent SDK for custom connections where pre-built connectors are absent. To migrate from Sierra to Forethought: map Sierra's data warehouse connectors (Snowflake, Databricks) to Forethought's Analytics API (Enterprise plan) or knowledge source connectors as applicable; Forethought's 70+ catalog provides more out-of-the-box helpdesk coverage for teams running multiple CX platforms. In both directions, re-authenticate credentials and validate data flow to each integration after cutover in a staging environment before going live.
- Warning: Forethought's Solve API and Analytics API for headless and custom integrations are Enterprise-only. Teams on Team or Professional plans are limited to the pre-built connector catalog.
- Warning: Sierra's data warehouse integrations (Snowflake, Databricks, Redis) have no direct parallel in Forethought's documented connector list. Teams using Sierra as a real-time data lookup layer against a warehouse need to evaluate whether Forethought can replicate that via its knowledge source connectors or requires custom API development.
- Warning: Sierra's Agent SDK requires developer involvement for custom integrations; Forethought's dashboard-configured connectors allow non-technical setup. Teams with limited engineering resources should plan additional implementation time when building custom Sierra integrations.
Forethought Triage Agent classifies and routes incoming tickets before a human agent sees them; Sierra's intelligent human handoff triggers escalation mid-conversation with a structured context summary when the AI cannot resolve the issue. Both surfaces handle the intent-to-human routing problem, but at different stages. Migrating from Forethought to Sierra: remove the Forethought Triage integration from your helpdesk (Zendesk, ServiceNow) and configure Sierra's escalation guardrails in Agent Studio to handle topic limits, sentiment thresholds, and explicit escalation requests — Sierra will then route to the correct queue with a pre-built conversation summary. Migrating from Sierra to Forethought: install the Forethought Zendesk/Salesforce app and configure triage models in the Forethought dashboard to classify inbound tickets by intent and priority before assignment; map Forethought triage queues to the same destinations Sierra was sending escalations. Note that Forethought triages before the conversation starts while Sierra escalates mid-conversation, so the routing logic timing differs — adjust queue SLAs accordingly.
- Warning: Forethought Triage uses out-of-the-box models on Team plan; custom handoff models trained on your own data require Professional or Enterprise. Teams migrating from Sierra who have accumulated nuanced escalation history should plan a Professional plan for Forethought to retrain on that data.
- Warning: Sierra's Live Assist agent-assist overlay is available during human-handled escalations, providing real-time suggestions to the live agent post-handoff. Forethought's equivalent (AI Copilot) is a separate product module — ensure it is also provisioned if you need that in-call assist capability on the Forethought side.
- Warning: Forethought Triage applies tags, sets priority, and assigns queues in the connected helpdesk before any human interaction; Sierra's handoff summary is delivered at the moment of escalation within a live chat or call. The two are architecturally different — Forethought acts pre-queue, Sierra acts mid-session — so both may be needed simultaneously rather than as true alternatives.