Today at its flagship global conference, Relate, Zendesk, Inc. introduced Zendesk AI, an intelligence layer that makes personalized, efficient and more empathetic customer experiences (CX) accessible for all companies. The new offering combines decades of Zendesk’s unique data and insights with new AI technologies, including the company’s proprietary models, as well as large language models (LLMs).

Available today, Zendesk AI will help companies instantly improve service experiences, save time, better understand their customers, and create seamless interactions. The solution continues to learn over time, is fast to deploy, easy to use, and immediately adds value without the need for large teams of developers or months of implementation time.

“More than 90% of our customers already use AI within Zendesk, and we are building on this great foundation with new solutions that any business can use immediately,” said Tom Eggemeier, CEO, Zendesk. “AI has significant benefits for agents, admins and businesses that want to deliver the best customer experience, and Zendesk AI will help them instantly see tangible value in cost savings and thousands of hours a month in gained productivity.”

New Advanced AI adds value from day one

According to the 2023 Zendesk CX Trends Report, customers have high expectations for AI; however, business leaders said their organizations have yet to achieve cost savings and improved efficiency. Zendesk AI allows companies to instantly infuse intelligence into every part of the service experience, resulting in smarter conversations that quickly resolve issues.

Built on the world’s largest CX-specific dataset, Zendesk AI continuously learns from every customer interaction and allows companies to better assist customers. By eliminating the work of manually assigning and routing inquiries, leaders can free up team capacity and reduce operating expenses. Additionally, by automatically solving more customer queries (especially during periods of high demand), businesses are in a better position to contain costs.

New capabilities announced today include*:

• Advanced bots: Enhanced, pre-trained bots for messaging and email automatically solve issues and leverage the most extensive database of customer intents for more personalized, industry-specific and accurate responses.
• Agent assistance: AI-powered insights and suggestions improve agent productivity by allowing agents to quickly solve customer issues and use AI-generated content to respond faster, with proper context.
• Intelligent triage: Uses intent detection, language detection, and sentiment analysis to create powerful intelligent workflows that get smarter over time, classify incoming customer requests and allow teams to power workflows based on these insights.

In addition, Zendesk recently announced a partnership with OpenAI and today, unveiled new features that leverage the power of generative AI. This includes response rephrasing and tone shift, which helps agents craft clearer and thoughtful responses to customers. These updates save substantive time and effort for agents.

“While running and scaling a successful CX team is complex, using AI should be simple,” said Cristina Fonseca, Head of AI, Zendesk. “With Zendesk AI, our proprietary models are specifically trained for CX and designed to immediately deliver actionable customer insights. These foundational features are key to improving customer service quality and agent efficiency, with potential to be even more powerful when combined with LLMs.”

Trust and security is imperative to building responsible AI and safeguarding other critical CX features. Zendesk is also launching Advanced Data Protection** that is designed to help companies with more advanced security needs adapt to compliance regulations with additional functionality.

To watch a replay of CEO Tom Eggemeier’s keynote, visit the on-demand Relate hub. To hear more about the company’s vision for intelligent CX visit the Zendesk Newsroom.

*Advanced AI requires a Suite Professional plan or higher. AI-powered capabilities for agents require Zendesk Agent Workspace.
**Advanced Data Protection will be available for Enterprise and Enterprise plus customers next quarter, more information coming in June.

About Zendesk
Zendesk is on a mission to simplify the complexity of business and make it easy for companies and customers to create connections. Our customer experience software unlocks the power of billions of interactions, enabling businesses to build rich, meaningful relationships with their customers. The company was conceived in Copenhagen, Denmark and today operates in more than 20 countries around the world. Learn more at www.zendesk.com.