The customer support industry is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. Zendesk launched a series of products driven by large language models at its AI summit on Wednesday, aiming to completely change the reliance on human technicians.
The core of the new features is an autonomous support agent, which Zendesk believes can resolve 80% of support issues without human intervention. This system will be supported by a range of complementary tools, including a co-pilot agent that assists human technicians with the remaining 20% of issues, as well as management agents, voice agents, and analytics agents.
Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk's Chief Product, Engineering, and AI Officer, believes these new agents are part of a broader transformation in the support industry, as AI takes over most of the work previously done by humans. In an interview with TechCrunch, Upadhyay openly stated that the entire world is moving from software built for human users to systems where AI handles most of the work.
Independent benchmarking data supports this shift. TAU-bench, a tool specifically designed to measure a model's ability to call functions, includes a scenario for handling returned products, which is highly similar to many support tasks. The top-ranked Claude Sonnet 4.5 solves 85% of the problems in this test.
This transition is not happening overnight. After a chaotic investor battle in 2022, Zendesk made a series of AI acquisitions that laid the foundation for the current transformation. The newly released analytics agent is directly built on Hyperarc, which the company acquired in July. Earlier AI acquisitions include the quality assurance and agent service system Klaus, acquired in February 2024, and the automation platform Ultimate, acquired in March of the following year.
Zendesk has already previewed the new system to existing customers, and Upadhyay said the results were promising. For customers using the system, consumer satisfaction increased by 5 to 10 percentage points.
Deploying large language models for customer support is no longer a novelty, but few companies have reached the scale of Zendesk. Companies such as Airbnb and Regal Theaters have tried internal chatbot support, usually signing directly with basic model laboratories. However, these systems typically handle only information retrieval, not more complex troubleshooting or taking autonomous actions.
If this AI-driven support initiative is successful, the economic impact will be massive. Zendesk's Resolution Platform already supports nearly 20,000 clients, resolving 4.6 billion tickets annually. Looking at the entire industry, the United States alone employs 2.4 million customer service representatives, while other countries have much larger numbers. This means a global transformation in the customer service industry is quietly underway, and the way millions of customer service professionals work will be completely reshaped.
