Zendesk Relate and the Autonomous Service Workforce

Set aside any preconceived notions about Zendesk. While the company built its reputation around service and ticketing, its focus today is on the Autonomous Service Workforce, AI agents, and resolutions.

At Zendesk Relate 2026, the company’s annual event that brought together more than 2,000 attendees, Zendesk outlined its vision for the Autonomous Service Workforce, built on the Zendesk Resolution Platform. Service and ticketing remain core parts of the business, but the company’s AI portfolio - including AI agents, AI Copilot, and AI QA -grew more than 100% over the past year. Zendesk’s broader mission is to resolve customer issues through a combination of AI agents and human agents, powered by the Zendesk Resolution Platform, a connected system of agents and copilots designed to support service operations.

As CEO Tom Eggemeir noted during his keynote, Zendesk introduced the Resolution Platform last year with the idea that customer resolutions require specialization. Trained on roughly 20 billion ticket interactions, the platform unifies data, intelligence, and workflows. The Resolution Learning Loop creates a continuous cycle of improvement, allowing the system to learn from every interaction and become more effective over time.

The shift underway goes beyond automation. It reflects service organizations moving from assisted workflows to autonomous resolution, from disconnected tools to a unified learning system, and from reporting on past activity to continuously improving future outcomes.

Autonomous Service Workforce

The central theme of the event was the Autonomous Service Workforce, a collection of specialized AI agents designed to perform specific functions. The strategy centers on:

• AI agents that execute tasks

• AI copilots that improve employee performance and support human agents by identifying customer intent, recommending responses, and suggesting next-best actions

• A learning loop that continuously makes the system smarter

According to Shashi Upadhyay, President, Product, Engineering, and AI, Zendesk is building a workforce that not only assists employees, but also completes work and changes how service is delivered. He explained that “The future isn’t one general purpose bot – it’s a network of specialized agents – agents for billing, returns, collections, claims, etc.” Each agent is grounded in the appropriate data and designed to handle real-world complexity, while the system coordinates work and drives outcomes. These AI agents are aligned with customer workflows, integrated into customer environments, and available out of the box.

A central component of this strategy is the Resolution Learning Loop, where every interaction becomes a learning signal that improves AI agent performance. The process focuses on identifying where AI failed, determining the root cause, learning from those failures, and feeding that information back into knowledge management systems to improve future interactions. More resolutions generate more learning data, which leads to additional recommendations and improvements, ultimately driving better outcomes over time.

Outcome-Based Pricing

This shift also requires a new business and pricing model. Zendesk argues that traditional seat-based software pricing is becoming less relevant in an AI-driven environment. Instead, the company is positioning itself as an early mover in outcome-based pricing, where customers pay only for outcomes produced by AI agents that are verifiably resolved or contained.

According to Zendesk, “If we don’t resolve the problem, we don’t get paid; customers will only pay for outcomes that are verifiably resolved or contained."

New Products and Anouncements

Zendesk announced a large number of new products and capabilities at Relate, including:

• Agentic AI agents — specialized AI agents that can reason across messaging, email, voice, and backend systems. Built on Zendesk’s acquisition of Forethought, these agents operate across messaging, email, voice, and AI platforms, as well as both Zendesk and third-party service environments.

• Agent Builder, a no-code interface that allows teams to create and refine custom agents using natural language

• Voice AI Agents for both Zendesk Voice and Zendesk Contact Center

• Proactive copilots for agents, administrators, knowledge teams, analysts, and service leaders

• Action Flows, MCP, and expanded Knowledge Connectors that allow AI agents to take action across existing enterprise systems

• Zendesk Contact Center, a native unified contact center offering

• A modern ITSM solution built on the same Resolution Platform

Zendesk Contact Center

For analysts covering the contact center market, one of the key focuses at the event was Zendesk Contact Center.

Built on the acquisition of Local Measure, Zendesk Contact Center is a native, AI-powered contact center built on the Zendesk Resolution Platform. The platform unifies voice, digital, and self-service interactions into a single workspace.

With multimodal capabilities, digital and video channels become part of the customer interaction experience. AI-powered workforce engagement management (WEM) is also built into the platform, supporting forecasting, scheduling, and interaction monitoring.

Built on Amazon Connect and leveraging AWS and Amazon Connect AI capabilities, the solution provides agentic AI capabilities through Voice AI agents embedded directly into the Zendesk Resolution Platform. This enabling seamless transfers to live agents with full context when escalation is required.

Zendesk Contact Center supports:

• Voice routing

• Omnichannel interactions

• Voice AI Agents that understand customers in real time and take action toward resolution

• Voice Copilots that provide AI-driven call guidance and next-best actions

• AI-powered voice assistance

• Video calling and screen sharing

• Real-time transcription

• Workforce support

• Voice QA across 100% of voice transcripts

• An integrated agent workspace

While Zendesk Contact Center is currently targeted primarily at SMBs, the company sees opportunities to expand further into larger enterprise environments over time.

Although the offering will likely appeal most to existing Zendesk customers, Zendesk Contact Center will also be available as a standalone offering, broadening its potential market.

As CRM and CCaaS platforms continue to converge, Zendesk (along with companies such as Salesforce) is betting that customer service organizations will increasingly prefer a single vendor that can deliver an integrated solution with fewer vendors, tighter workflows, and broader functionality.

Differentiation

As shown in this video, I had the opportunity to speak with Keith Pearce, SVP, Product Marketing, about the Autonomous Service Workforce, the Agent Builder for creating custom AI agents, Zendesk Contact Center, and other announcements. He also discussed Zendesk’s differentiation strategy and its approach to outcome-based pricing.

Thoughts

Zendesk has evolved significantly from its origins as a ticketing vendor. The company now has a broader vision centered on an AI-first operating model and the changing relationship between humans and AI in customer service.

The company’s focus on resolution rather than tickets aligns well with broader market trends, and the outcome-based pricing model reinforces that positioning.

A recurring theme throughout the event was the need for businesses to rethink workflows and operational processes. While organizations want to move quickly with AI adoption, trust, security, and governance remain major considerations. The challenge is not only implementing new technology, but also redesigning workflows, modernizing knowledge management, and helping teams mature operationally so AI can deliver value at scale.

As Zendesk expands its vision, it will also face several challenges.

• Acquisition alignment and integration: Zendesk has acquired multiple companies in recent years, including Forethought, Local Measure, Unleash, HyperArc, and Ultimate. These acquisitions have accelerated product development and expanded capabilities, but integrating technologies, infrastructure, analytics, and product roadmaps often takes longer than expected. Overlap between acquired and internally developed products will also need to be rationalized over time.

  For example, Zendesk currently offers internally developed Voice AI capabilities alongside capabilities gained through the Forethought acquisition. Zendesk must unify these experiences without creating inconsistencies across products and channels. If the platform appears fragmented, it could weaken the company’s broader “single system” message.

• Company perception: Zendesk is still widely viewed as a customer service and support company. The company will need to continue educating the market about its expanded AI capabilities and broader platform strategy. Many customers attending Relate still primarily use Zendesk for help desk and ticketing functions. While interest in the company’s AI tools was high, many organizations have not yet deployed them in production. Adoption will take time as customers become more comfortable with operational AI systems.

• Competition: As Zendesk expands into adjacent markets, it is also expanding its competitive landscape. Although Zendesk continues to partner with many CCaaS vendors, Zendesk Contact Center also places the company in direct competition with them. Established vendors such as Five9 and NICE already have strong enterprise credibility and mature voice infrastructures. Zendesk will need to differentiate through platform integration, workflow simplicity, and operational efficiency rather than feature parity alone.

• Trust: Many organizations remain cautious about deploying AI into production environments. Zendesk must demonstrate measurable ROI, strong governance controls, reliability, and consistent performance at scale.

• Pricing: The move toward outcome- or resolution-based pricing also introduces complexity. Defining what qualifies as a “resolution” can be difficult, and some organizations may view pricing variability as a risk. Zendesk will need to clearly demonstrate value so customers see the model as an improvement over traditional licensing structures.

Despite these challenges, Zendesk is well-positioned to continue pushing the market toward resolution-centric service models. By focusing on outcomes rather than tickets, the company is attempting to redefine how customer service platforms create value.

It's about impact, outcomes, resolutions - this is a message most businesses can relate to, helping them deliver better customer experiences.