Zendesk Introduces Specialized AI Agents

Zendesk introduced Specialized AI Agents purpose-built for specific businesses or industries. They combine industry expertise with each company's unique knowledge, workflows, and connected systems to take action and automate up to 80 percent of workflows.

The launch includes Industry Agents, which come ready for common, high-value work in specific industries, and Custom Agents, which businesses build around their own processes, policies and expertise.

"The era of generic, one-size-fits-all AI agents is over. The best agents are specialists: deeply grounded in the work, the industry, and the business they serve," said Shashi Upadhyay, president of product, engineering, and AI at Zendesk, in a statement. "Specialized Agents give organizations the expertise and context to take on more complex work, earn trust, and drive quantitative impact."

Industry Agents are built for the work businesses within a specific industry have in common. Zendesk is launching with commerce, where AI agents can help customers shop, manage orders, process returns and exchanges, resolve delivery issues, and handle refunds. Over time, Zendesk will expand Industry Agents to additional industries, including financial services, media, and technologyy.

Industry Agents combine Zendesk AI with the systems, policies, and expertise required to complete high-value workflows from start to finish. In commerce, that means connecting to systems such as Shopify, Narvar, Stripe, and Riskified to understand the customer's request, retrieve the right information, and take action without requiring customers or service teams to move between multiple systems.

Zendesk is also working with Riskified to bring risk intelligence directly into commerce workflows, helping retailers make smarter decisions about returns, refunds, and exchanges while reducing fraud and policy abuse.

"Zendesk Industry Agents are the AI-first platform redefining retail service at scale," said Jeff Otto, chief marketing officer of Riskified, in a statement. "We're excited to embed our specialist AI agents and Identity Risk Intelligence so that every agent, AI or human, confidently knows who they're actually engaging with, creating delightful experiences for good customers while protecting retailers from fraud and abuse losses."

Using Agent Builder,Zendesk’s no-code environment for creating, testing and deploying agents, businesses can now build Custom Agents attuned to how their business is run. Businesses define the job an agent owns, the systems it can use, the actions it can take, and where human approval is required. Agents can also run proactively in response to business events or on a schedule, extending automation beyond customer-initiated requests.

Industry and Custom Agents can run in Zendesk or in service environments including Salesforce and ServiceNow. As agents complete more work, Zendesk continuously learns from the resulting outcomes, helping organizations understand what worked, where agents needed help and how future service can improve.