Zendesk announced a series of new products driven by large language models at its AI summit on Wednesday. These products are intended to reshape the company’s reliance on human support technicians. The centerpiece of the new features is an autonomous support agent that Zendesk believes will solve eighty percent of support issues without any human intervention. That system will be supplemented by a co-pilot agent, which will assist human technicians with the remaining twenty percent of issues. Also included are an admin-layer agent, a voice-based agent, and an analytics agent.
According to Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk’s President of Product, Engineering and AI, the new agents are part of a broader transformation in the support industry. He stated that AI is replacing much of the work that was previously done by humans. Upadhyay told TechCrunch that the world is shifting from software built for human users to a system where AI does most of the work.
Independent benchmarks suggest that contemporary AI models are capable of taking on this work. One benchmark, designed to measure a model’s tool-calling ability, includes a scenario where models have to process a returned product, which is a close analogue to many support tasks. The current leading model solves eighty-five percent of issues on this test.
After a period of investor conflict in 2022, Zendesk made a series of AI acquisitions that laid the groundwork for this current shift. The analytics agent launching now is built directly on a company called Hyperarc, which Zendesk acquired in July. Earlier AI acquisitions include the quality assurance system Klaus, acquired in February 2024, and the automation platform Ultimate, acquired the following March.
Zendesk has previewed the new system with existing customers, and Upadhyay says the results have been promising. He told TechCrunch that for customers using it, consumer satisfaction has increased by five to ten points.
Large language models have often been deployed for customer support, though rarely at the scale Zendesk operates. Companies from Airbnb to Regal Theaters have already experimented with in-house chatbot support, often contracting directly with foundation model labs. However, those systems typically deal with simple information retrieval rather than more complex troubleshooting or taking self-directed action.
If this new push for AI-based support is successful, the economic implications would be significant. Zendesk’s Resolution Platform already supports nearly twenty thousand customers, resolving 4.6 billion tickets each year. Beyond Zendesk, the United States employs 2.4 million customer service representatives, with far larger workforces in other countries.