Zendesk says its new AI agent can solve 80% of support issues

On Wednesday at its AI Summit, Zendesk announced a series of LLM-driven products that aim to reshape the company’s reliance on human technicians.

The New Features Center is an independent support agent that Zendesk believes will resolve 80% of support issues without human intervention. This system will be supplemented by an assistant agent, which will help human technicians solve the remaining 20% ​​of problems, as well as a management layer agent, a voice agent, and an analytical agent.

According to Shashi Upadhyay, head of product, engineering and AI at Zendesk, the new customers are part of a broader change in the support industry, where AI is replacing much of the work previously done by humans.

“The world will shift from software designed for human users to a system where AI does most of the work,” Upadhyay told TechCrunch.

Independent benchmarks indicate that contemporary AI models are capable of doing the work. TAU seatwhich is designed to measure a model’s ability to recall tools, involves a scenario in which models have to process a returned product – a close analogy to many support tasks. Current leaderClaude Sonnet 4.5 solves 85% of the problems in the test.

after A messy battle between investors in 2022Zendesk has made a series of AI acquisitions that have laid the foundation for its current transformation. The analytics agent launched today is built directly on top of the company Acquire Hyperarcwhich was completed in July. Previous acquisitions include artificial intelligence Quality assurance and Klaus agent service system (Acquired in February 2024) and The ultimate automation platform (Acquired the following March).

Zendesk has been previewing the new system with existing customers, and Upadhyay says the results have been promising.

“For customers who used it, consumer satisfaction went up by five to 10 points,” he told TechCrunch.

Large language models are often deployed for customer support, although they rarely reach the scale of Zendesk. Companies from Airbnb to Royal theatres We’ve already experimented with internal Chatbot support, often contracting directly with core prototyping labs. But these systems typically deal with information retrieval rather than more complex troubleshooting or self-directed actions.

If the new push for AI-based support is successful, the economic consequences will be significant. Zendesk’s resolution platform already supports nearly 20,000 customers, resolving 4.6 billion tickets each year. Outside of Zendesk, it employs US 2.4 million customer service representatives -With much larger workforces in other countries.