Article • 5 min read
Enter your resolution era with Zendesk’s agentic AI
A new generation of AI agents built to understand, adapt, and solve real customer issues.
Maddy Strorck
Senior Product Marketing Manager at Zendesk
Zuletzt aktualisiert: June 26, 2025
AI has completely changed what customers expect from support. When your smart home assistant can tell you you’re low on groceries and place an order for you, it’s only natural that customers now expect the same level of proactive problem-solving from businesses, too. They’re no longer just hoping for a quick reply—they’re starting to expect AI to fully resolve their issues.
But that’s where things have fallen short. While AI has long promised to transform customer service, the reality has been a mix of basic chatbots answering FAQs or overly complex systems requiring weeks to train and extensive resources to manage. The real prize—AI that can deliver complete, personalized resolutions at scale—has remained out of reach. Until now.
That’s why Zendesk built The Resolution Platform: the only AI-powered system where automation, AI, and agents work together to resolve customer issues from start to finish. At its core, agentic AI gives our AI agents the ability to solve problems on their own—no scripts or training required. They adapt on the fly, collaborate with human agents when needed, draw from shared knowledge, and take action across your systems to ensure every customer gets the right outcome.
Real businesses, real results
This is already happening.
Zendesk is the largest global provider of agentic AI for service, helping more than 10,000 companies worldwide, resolving up to 80–90% of customer conversations, and powering more than 4.6 billion resolutions each year.
When Phonero, a Norwegian mobile provider, faced a 194% spike in support volume, their AI agent stepped in to automate 59% of resolutions across channels. This helped them stay ahead of demand without compromising service quality.
Thanks to the automation of resolutions like booking appointments, Hello Sugar, a beauty and wellness franchise, has doubled its locations without adding headcount. Right now, 66% of all incoming questions are resolved without human involvement, saving them $14K each month.
These businesses aren’t just adopting AI, they’re using it to reduce costs, deliver better customer outcomes, and grow faster. And they’re setting an incredibly high bar for everyone else: 70% of customers say they’re noticing a clear difference between companies that use AI well, and those that don’t.
What makes agentic AI different
At the core of Zendesk AI agents is something new: agentic AI. It’s a different kind of intelligence built to resolve real customer issues, not just react to them.
Unlike task-based bots that follow predefined scripts, agentic AI makes it possible for Zendesk AI agents to behave more like a seasoned human agent. They can think through ambiguous problems, make decisions in the moment, and adapt as the conversation evolves. If something’s unclear, they can ask follow-up questions and help the customer through to a solution.
“The old world was message in, response out. Real customers change their minds, ask clarifying questions, and expect the AI to follow along naturally. In service, the only outcome that matters is resolution, and until now, bots have been somewhat limited in their ability to achieve it.”
– Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk
How Zendesk AI agents work together to solve problems
So how do they actually do it?
Powered by a sophisticated multi-agent architecture, Zendesk AI agents collaborate behind the scenes to understand, reason, and act. Each agent is specialized—just like roles on a support team—and they work in concert to deliver faster, more accurate resolutions. While it might feel like one seamless conversation to the customer, there’s an intelligent system of agents coordinating the resolution in real time. Best of all, there’s nothing to configure—this orchestration happens automatically as part of how Zendesk’s agentic AI works behind the scenes.
Here’s how they operate under the hood:
1. Understand what the customer needs
The first step to resolving any issue is understanding it clearly. Rather than follow a preloaded script, the Task Identification Agent has a real conversation with the customer to understand exactly what’s needed. If there’s any confusion, it can ask questions to define the request upfront.
By accurately identifying the task from the start, it reduces misroutes and manual intervention to help customers get faster answers and lighten the load on your support team.
2. Respond with relevant, contextual answers
Once they nail down the issue, the Conversational RAG Agent finds the right information to help. If it needs additional information, it too can follow-up to make sure it’s providing the most accurate response. For example: if a customer wants to know more about payment options, this agent can follow-up to ask where the customer is located in order to pull up the right policy.
By adapting to real-time conversations, this agent provides more accurate information and reduces the need for customers to reach out again.
3. Follow your business rules
Every company has its own way of doing things. That’s where the Procedure Compliance Agent comes into play. It takes your written business processes and converts them into structured, repeatable logic that makes it possible to act autonomously, but always within your guardrails.
4. Take action to solve the problem
After the problem is understood and the path is clear, the Procedure Execution Agent makes the conversations actionable. By connecting to internal systems like billing or order management, it can take the steps needed to get to a speedy resolution, whether that’s verifying someone’s identity, updating a subscription, or issuing a refund.
“We’ve given the bot more agency in guiding the conversation while operating within Zendesk’s guardrails for quality and accuracy. The process started by understanding the customer’s issue with a high focus on driving towards resolution.”
– Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk
All of this happens behind the scenes—just define what you want to resolve, and Zendesk’s agentic AI orchestrates the right path to resolution automatically. No manual setup needed.
Let’s build a smarter path to resolution
Powered by agentic AI, Zendesk’s next-generation AI agents don’t just answer questions. They solve real problems by asking smart questions, adapting to new information, and solving problems autonomously—freeing your team to focus on the kinds of problems that only humans can solve.
The future of customer service is here, and it’s powered by AI that finally lives up to its promise. Ready to experience the difference?
