{"id":200138,"date":"2025-10-09T12:48:16","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T12:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/200138\/"},"modified":"2025-10-09T12:48:16","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T12:48:16","slug":"zendesk-says-its-new-ai-agent-can-solve-80-of-support-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/200138\/","title":{"rendered":"Zendesk says its new AI agent can solve 80% of support issues"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"speakable-summary\" class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Zendesk announced Wednesday at its AI summit a string of LLM-driven products meant to reshape the company\u2019s reliance on human technicians.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The center of the new features is an autonomous support agent that Zendesk believes will solve 80% of support issues without human intervention. That system will be supplemented by a co-pilot agent, which will assist human technicians with the remaining 20% of issues, as well as an admin-layer agent, a voice-based agent, and an analytics agent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">According to Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk\u2019s president of Product, Engineering and AI, the new agents are part of a broader change in the support industry, as AI replaces much of the work that was previously done by humans.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cThe world\u2019s going to shift from software that\u2019s built for human users, to a system where AI actually does most of the work,\u201d Upadhyay told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Independent benchmarks suggest that contemporary AI models are capable of taking on the work. <a href=\"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/2406.12045\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">TAU-bench<\/a>, which was designed to measure a model\u2019s\u00a0tool-calling ability,\u00a0includes a scenario in which models have to process a returned product \u2014 a close analogue to many support tasks. <a href=\"https:\/\/llm-stats.com\/benchmarks\/tau-bench-retail\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">The current leader<\/a>, Claude Sonnet 4.5, solves 85% of issues on the test.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2022\/03\/18\/zendesks-latest-problem-is-an-activist-investor\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">a chaotic investor fight in 2022<\/a>, Zendesk has made a string of AI acquisitions that laid the groundwork for the current shift. The analytics agent launching today is built directly on the company\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.zendesk.com\/newsroom\/articles\/hyperarc-acquisition\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Hyperarc acquisition<\/a>, which was completed in July. Earlier AI acquisitions include the <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/02\/13\/ai-powered-estonian-qa-startup-klaus-acquired-by-zendesk\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">QA and agentic service system Klaus<\/a> (acquired in February 2024) and <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/03\/13\/zendesk-adds-flexible-ai-agent-capabilities-with-ultimate-acquisition\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">the automation platform Ultimate<\/a> (acquired the following March).<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Zendesk has previewed the new system with existing customers, and Upadhyay says the results have been promising.<\/p>\n<p>Techcrunch event<\/p>\n<p>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|<br \/>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u201cFor customers that have been using it, consumer satisfaction has been up by five to 10 points,\u201d he told TechCrunch.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Large language models have often been deployed for customer support, although rarely at the Zendesk\u2019s scale. Companies from <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2025\/05\/02\/airbnb-is-quietly-rolling-out-an-ai-customer-service-bot-in-the-us\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Airbnb<\/a> to <a href=\"https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/2024\/10\/30\/regal-claims-its-customer-service-chatbots-are-better-than-most\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Regal Theaters<\/a> have already experimented with in-house chatbot support, often contracting directly with foundation model labs. But those systems typically deal with information retrieval rather than more complex troubleshooting or taking self-directed action.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If the new push for AI-based support is successful, the economic implications would be significant. Zendesk\u2019s Resolution Platform already supports nearly 20,000 customers, resolving 4.6 billion tickets each year. Beyond Zendesk, the U.S. employs <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bls.gov\/ooh\/office-and-administrative-support\/customer-service-representatives.htm#:~:text=Customer%20service%20representatives%20typically%20use,employed%20in%20nearly%20every%20industry.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">2.4 million customer service representatives<\/a> \u2014 with far larger workforces in other countries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zendesk announced Wednesday at its AI summit a string of LLM-driven products meant to reshape the company\u2019s reliance&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,16014,49,48,61104,61,98753],"class_list":["post-200138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-automation","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-crm","tag-technology","tag-zendesk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}