Zendesk introduces Specialized Agents to help businesses get high-value service work done

The best customer service feels simple to the person asking for help. Behind every simple interaction, there can be a lot of work: checking an order, applying a policy, reviewing customer history, coordinating with another team, taking action in another system. That work looks different in every industry and every business.

AI agents can now take on more of this work. But to make a real dent in it, they need more than the ability to respond. They need to understand the work itself, the industry they serve, and the way a particular business operates.

Today, Zendesk is introducing Specialized Agents. The launch brings together Industry Agents with pre-built expertise for high-value industry workflows and Custom Agents that adapt to each business’s own policies, knowledge, and systems. Specialized Agents are the latest step in Zendesk’s vision for an Autonomous Service Workforce. In this workforce, AI agents, automation, and human expertise work together in one service platform. AI takes on autonomous work while teams retain control over direction, business rules, and guardrails that shape every outcome.

Deploy agents quickly, then tailor the experience to your business

Businesses don’t have to choose between speed and flexibility. Industry Agents give teams a fast start with ready-to-use expertise for common, high-volume workflows. Custom Agents extend that foundation to the unique and complex work that depends on a business’s own policies, processes, knowledge, and systems.

Used together, Industry Agents and Custom Agents form a team of specialists that takes on more of the work across a service operation. One agent can handle a common request while another gathers context, applies business-specific rules, coordinates actions across systems, or routes an exception to the right person.

This gives businesses the best of both worlds: faster time to value for the workflows that are easiest to automate, and the flexibility to take on the heavier lifting and coordination work that has traditionally bogged teams down.

From conversation to completion

Consider a customer who wants to exchange a recently purchased bike.

An answer-only assistant might explain the return policy and send the customer to another page. A Specialized Agent can do more. 

It can:

• Retrieve customer and order history

• Check the applicable business policy

• Confirm inventory

• Evaluate relevant risk signals

• Initiate the exchange

• Provide next steps

The customer does not need to know which team or system owns each step. The agent coordinates the work behind the scenes and keeps the conversation moving.

That same approach applies to a refund request, which often spans multiple systems.

An agent can: 

• Check the order in Shopify

• Confirm the business policy in Zendesk

• Review risk signals in Riskified

• Invoke a custom refund policy based on the customer loyalty points

• Coordinate the refund workflow

A future workforce built by specialists

Specialized Agents are the building blocks of Zendesk’s Autonomous Service Workforce. Industry Agents provide a starting point for the work businesses in an industry have in common, while Custom Agents extend that foundation to the work unique to each company. Working together on the Zendesk platform, these agents can collaborate with people and one another, connect to the systems where work happens, and take action across the customer journey. 

Zendesk brings AI agents, human expertise, shared customer data, and connected systems together to turn more questions into resolutions, and more resolutions into growth.