The complete guide to AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets in 2025

If you’re managing a support team, your Monday morning probably feels a bit like Groundhog Day. You’re staring at a queue of last week's tickets, trying to manually sort, prioritize, and figure out what’s going on. It’s slow, tedious, and a massive bottleneck that keeps your team from getting to the real work.

Without some kind of automation, your team spends way too much time on repetitive tasks instead of digging into the tricky customer problems that actually require a human brain. This leads to messy tagging, slower responses, and a ton of valuable insights getting lost in the noise.

This is where AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets can seriously help. It uses artificial intelligence to look at incoming tickets, understand what they’re about (intent, sentiment, urgency), and then automatically take the first few steps, freeing up your agents for more important things.

In this guide, we’ll walk through what AI workflow automation actually is, take a look at what Zendesk's own AI can do, weigh the pros and cons of building a custom solution, and show you how a unified platform might be the simplest path forward.

What is AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets?

At its core, AI workflow automation is about letting AI handle the first-pass review of a support ticket, and it’s a lot smarter than old-school, keyword-based rules. Instead of just flagging a ticket because it has the word "refund," the AI reads the entire message to understand the context and figure out what the customer is truly trying to do.

It usually works in three simple steps:

1. A ticket arrives: The whole thing kicks off the moment a new ticket is created in your Zendesk account.

2. The AI reads it: The AI then scans the subject and description. It’s looking for clues about the customer's sentiment (are they happy or about to explode?), their intent (is this a refund request or a bug report?), and how urgent it seems.

3. An action is taken: Based on what it learned, the AI does something useful. It could be applying the right tags, setting the priority level, assigning the ticket to a specific team, or even firing back an accurate, pre-approved response right away.

The core components of Zendesk's native AI automation

Zendesk has its own set of AI tools built-in, which can definitely help teams get started with automation. But it’s worth understanding how they work and, more importantly, where they fall short.

Intelligent triage and routing

Zendesk's AI can detect the intent, language, and sentiment of a ticket. This lets you build rules to route requests to the right agent or department. For example, a ticket from a frustrated customer about a billing issue can be automatically flagged as "Urgent" and sent directly to your billing team.

The catch is that this system often leans on pre-defined categories that you have to set up and, crucially, keep updated. If a brand-new issue starts popping up, the AI won’t know what to do with it until you go in and manually tweak the rules. It has a hard time learning from the subtle, unwritten solutions that your best agents have picked up over thousands of past conversations.

Agent copilot and generative AI

Zendesk also offers AI tools that act as a sidekick for your agents. They can suggest replies, summarize long ticket threads, or help expand short notes into a full response that matches your company's tone.

This is more agent assistance than true automation. An agent still has to be there to review, edit, and send the final message. While it can speed things up, it doesn’t reduce the total number of tickets an agent has to personally handle, which is what you need to do if you want to scale your support and shrink your backlog.

Zendesk AI pricing and complexity

To get your hands on Zendesk's best AI features, you usually have to be on their higher-tier plans or purchase some pricey add-ons. Many of the core AI tools are only available on the Suite Professional plan and up, and you'll often pay extra for things like the Copilot.

Even more importantly, Zendesk often uses a pay-per-resolution model for its AI. This means your bill can swing wildly from month to month and climb as your ticket volume grows, basically penalizing you for being successful. It’s a model that can make budgeting a real challenge.

Feature	Suite Team ($55/agent/mo)	Suite Professional ($115/agent/mo)	Suite Enterprise ($169/agent/mo)
AI Agents (Basic)	Included (limited ARs*)	Included (more ARs*)	Included (most ARs*)
Intelligent Triage	Add-on (via Copilot)	Add-on (via Copilot)	Add-on (via Copilot)
Agent Copilot	Add-on	Add-on	Add-on
Advanced AI Agents	Add-on	Add-on	Add-on
Predictable Cost	No (Pay-per-resolution model*)	No (Pay-per-resolution model*)	No (Pay-per-resolution model*)

AR = Automated Resolution. Plans come with a small number of included ARs; extra usage is billed per resolution, which can lead to unpredictable costs.

Building custom AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets with third-party tools

For teams who want more control, there's always the option of piecing together a solution with third-party tools. But this path has its own set of headaches.

The power and pitfalls of the DIY approach

It’s tempting to think you can just connect Zendesk’s API to a large language model like OpenAI using a tool like Make.com or n8n. In theory, this gives you total freedom to build any workflow you can dream up.

In reality? This approach is incredibly complex and gets expensive fast. You need some serious technical chops to set it up and keep it running. We're talking webhooks, multiple API calls, and separate subscriptions for every tool in your chain. The whole system is fragile, if one piece breaks, everything can grind to a halt. You won’t have a single dashboard for analytics, and you have no safe way to test how your AI will behave before you unleash it on live customers.

Point solutions vs. integrated platforms

Other tools on the market offer pre-built apps for specific tasks, like auto-tagging or merging duplicate tickets. They can be easy to set up for one job, which sounds great on the surface.

The problem is that you end up with a collection of siloed tools, not a single, smart system. You might need one app for sentiment analysis and another for routing, leaving you with a fragmented workflow and multiple dashboards to check. They don’t create one central "brain" that learns from all your company knowledge, whether it’s in past tickets, a Confluence wiki, or internal Google Docs.

A better way: Unified AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets with eesel AI

A unified platform gives you the power of a custom solution without all the complexity, plugging right into the tools you already use.

Go live in minutes with one-click integration and simulation

Instead of spending weeks wrestling with APIs, a platform like eesel AI connects to your Zendesk account in just a few clicks. It's a completely self-serve setup, meaning you don't have to sit through a mandatory demo or a long sales pitch just to try it out.

But the biggest advantage is being able to test everything with confidence. eesel AI’s powerful simulation mode runs your AI setup on thousands of your actual past tickets. It shows you exactly how the AI would have tagged, triaged, and responded, giving you a clear forecast of your automation rate. You can spot areas for improvement before a single customer ever interacts with it. No more guesswork.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, which provides a safe testing environment for AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets.

Unify all your knowledge for a smarter AI

The issue with a lot of AI tools is that they only learn from a narrow set of data, like your public help articles. eesel AI connects all of your knowledge sources to create an AI that is much smarter and has way more context.

It learns from:

• Your entire Zendesk ticket history: This helps it understand your brand’s unique voice and the real-world solutions your team has already found to be successful.

• Your knowledge base and macros: So it can provide consistent, pre-approved answers every time.

• External sources: It can pull information from Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and more, making sure it has access to the same deep knowledge as your most experienced agent.

An infographic illustrating how eesel AI centralizes knowledge from different sources to power AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets.

Total control and predictable pricing

With eesel AI, you get fine-grained control to decide exactly which types of tickets the AI should handle. You can start small by automating the most common, repetitive questions and then scale up confidently as you see the results.

Best of all, the pricing is straightforward and predictable. eesel AI plans are based on usage tiers, with no per-resolution fees. You’ll never get a nasty surprise on your bill after a busy month, which is a common headache with Zendesk's native AI pricing. You get all the benefits of automation without the budget anxiety.

A screenshot of eesel AI's public pricing page, showcasing the transparent pricing for their AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets.

Ready to automate your Zendesk ticket review?

Let's be honest: manually reviewing every single Zendesk ticket just doesn't scale. While Zendesk's built-in AI is a decent starting point, it can get expensive and feel limited. DIY solutions promise ultimate power but often deliver a lot of complexity, and single-purpose apps create a disjointed system that's a pain to manage.

A unified platform like eesel AI hits the sweet spot: it’s simple to set up, unifies all your knowledge, lets you simulate everything risk-free, and comes with predictable pricing. It’s the smartest way to implement AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets and free up your team to focus on what they do best: helping your customers.

Instead of spending another Monday sifting through the queue, why not find out how much you could automate? Run a free, instant simulation on your Zendesk history with eesel AI.

This video explains how to get automated weekly summaries of your Zendesk trends, a key benefit of AI workflow automation to review Zendesk tickets.