How to enable Zendesk AI: A practical guide

So, you’re looking into switching on the AI features in Zendesk. Good call. You’re probably trying to automate away some of those repetitive tickets, get answers to customers faster, and generally make life easier for your support team. On paper, Zendesk AI promises all of that, with a bunch of tools baked right into the platform you already use.

But here’s the thing: turning these features on isn’t always as simple as flipping a switch.

This guide will walk you through what Zendesk AI actually is, the steps you’ll need to take to get it running, and a frank look at what it does well (and what it doesn’t). We’ll also cover a more flexible way to bring AI into your Zendesk setup without having to completely overhaul how you work.

What is Zendesk AI?

First things first, let’s clear up what we’re talking about. Zendesk AI isn’t one single thing; it’s more like a family of features and add-ons designed to help with customer service. The main players you’ll be dealing with are AI Agents and Copilot.

• Zendesk AI Agents: Think of these as your frontline bots, meant to solve customer problems on their own. They dig through your help center articles to come up with replies for messaging, email, and web forms. Zendesk has two flavors: "Essential" (which comes with Suite plans) for basic Q&A, and "Advanced" (a paid add-on) for bots that can handle more back-and-forth conversation.

• Zendesk Copilot: This is an AI sidekick for your human agents, and it’s also a paid add-on. It lives inside the agent’s workspace and helps by summarizing tickets, suggesting replies, or even changing the tone of a comment to be more friendly or formal. The idea is to help your team work faster, not to replace them.

• Intelligent Triage: This feature works behind the scenes to automatically categorize incoming tickets based on what the customer wants, their language, and even their sentiment. It’s what helps power the routing and some automated replies, but it’s only as good as the AI’s ability to understand your customers’ specific requests.

While these tools are built into Zendesk, they’re often separate add-ons that come with their own setup and price tags, which we’ll get into a bit later.

How to enable Zendesk AI

Activating Zendesk’s native AI means digging into the Admin Center for some configuration. Zendesk markets it as a smooth part of their suite, but the reality is that it takes some real setup, especially for the fancier features. Here’s a general idea of what you’re in for.

Turning on the basic AI agent

The basic AI Agent is the easiest one to get going since it’s included in the modern Suite plans. Here are the general steps:

1. Get your help center in order: The AI Agent almost completely depends on your Zendesk Guide articles for its answers. Before you even think about turning it on, your knowledge base needs to be thorough, well-organized, and up-to-date. If it’s a mess, your bot will be, too.

2. Set up your channels: Make sure the channels where you want the bot to work (like messaging, email, or a web form) are configured correctly.

3. Build and publish the bot: You’ll go into the bots section in the Admin Center, create a new AI Agent, give it a name and some personality, and link it to your help center. Once you’ve tested it out, you can publish it to the channels you picked.

Setting up advanced AI features

This is where things get a bit more technical. To unlock tools like Copilot or the Advanced AI Agent, you first have to buy the add-on. Then, the setup gets more involved. For example, setting up an advanced AI agent is like onboarding a new employee.

You have to add the AI agent as a new admin user with its own email, put it in a dedicated group, give it API access, authorize data imports, and then manually create and order your automation triggers to make sure it behaves correctly.

This process, juggling user roles, API access, and trigger logic, points to a bigger truth: Zendesk’s AI isn’t just a feature you turn on. It’s a system you have to weave into your admin setup. It can be a real time-sink and requires you to be pretty comfortable with the technical side of Zendesk. It’s a very different experience from tools like eesel AI, which connect to your Zendesk account in a single click, with none of that complex user or trigger management.

The pros and cons of Zendesk AI

Once you’ve jumped through the hoops and enabled Zendesk AI, you get access to a toolkit that’s nicely integrated. But it’s important to know its limits so you don’t expect miracles.

What it does well

• Fits right into the UI: Since it’s a native tool, the AI features for agents (like Copilot’s summarization or tone shifter) feel like they belong in the Zendesk workspace. There’s no clunky new interface to learn.

• Uses your help center as a single source of truth: If you’re one of those teams with a perfectly maintained Zendesk Guide, the AI Agent can be pretty good at handling common questions by pulling answers straight from that source.

• Handles basic ticket routing: Intelligent Triage can usually pick out common requests (like "billing question" or "refund request") and send them to the right team, which cuts down on manual sorting.

Where it falls short

The biggest issue with Zendesk’s AI is that it lives in a walled garden. This creates some major headaches for teams whose knowledge is spread out or whose needs are a bit more complex.

1. It only reads from the Zendesk library: Zendesk’s AI mostly learns from your Zendesk Help Center and macros. It can’t connect to other places where your answers might be, like Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, or even your past tickets. If the real, nuanced answers your team uses are stored anywhere else, the AI is completely blind to them.

2. Workflows are rigid: Automation is tied to Zendesk’s triggers and automations system, which can be clunky. It makes it hard to set up fine-grained rules for when the AI should step in versus when it should immediately hand off to a human. You can’t, for example, easily tell it to only automate simple T1 tickets that it’s 100% sure about.

3. No way to safely test at scale: You can do some basic testing, but Zendesk doesn’t have a proper simulation mode. You can’t run your AI setup against thousands of your past tickets to see how it would have performed. That means you’re flying a bit blind when you go live, with no real forecast of its resolution rate.

This is where a solution like eesel AI really shines. It’s designed to pull knowledge from all your sources, not just what’s in your helpdesk. Plus, its simulation mode lets you test on historical tickets so you can roll out automation knowing exactly what to expect.

A simpler alternative to Zendesk AI

What if you could get smarter AI in Zendesk with a setup that takes a few minutes instead of a few days? That’s the whole idea behind third-party AI platforms that plug into the helpdesk you already have. Instead of being stuck with Zendesk’s built-in limits, you can layer a more intelligent solution right on top.

eesel AI was built to do exactly this. It connects directly to your Zendesk account and puts you in the driver’s seat of your support automation, withoutmaking you switch tools.

Here’s how it gets around Zendesk AI’s limitations:

• Go live in minutes: eesel AI is completely self-serve. You connect your Zendesk account with one click and can get an AI agent up and running on your own. No need to sit through mandatory sales demos or mess with complicated APIs just to get started.

• Bring all your knowledge together: Don’t limit your AI to just help center articles. eesel AI connects to over 100 sources, including past tickets, Google Docs, Confluence, and Notion. It learns from your team’s best resolutions from the past, so its answers are based on what’s actually worked for you.

• You’re in complete control: You get to decide exactly which tickets the AI touches. You can start small, automating just a few simple topics, and have it escalate everything else. You can even build custom actions that let the AI look up order info in Shopify or do other tasks through API calls, all from a simple editor.

• Test without the risk: Before you flip the switch, you can run a simulation on thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a clear picture of how it’ll perform, what its resolution rate will be, and how much money you’ll save. You can deploy it feeling confident, not just hopeful.

Zendesk AI pricing

Figuring out the cost of Zendesk AI can be a headache because the features are split across different plans and paid add-ons. It’s not one flat fee.

Plan/Add-on	Price (per agent/month, billed annually)	Key AI Features Included
Suite Team	$55	AI Agents (Essential), Generative replies
Suite Professional	$115	Everything in Team + more help centers
Suite Enterprise	$169	Everything in Professional + more help centers
Copilot Add-on	Contact Sales (usually adds to your Suite price)	Auto assist, intelligent triage, ticket summarization, suggested macros
Advanced AI Agents Add-on	Contact Sales (usage-based pricing)	More autonomous, multi-step AI agents

With Zendesk’s model, getting the really useful AI features means buying expensive add-ons like Copilot or Advanced AI agents. The costs can get unpredictable pretty quickly, especially with the usage-based parts.

In comparison, eesel AI’s pricing is straightforward. Plans are based on a set number of AI interactions each month, and you get all the core tools (AI Agent, Copilot, Triage) included. There are no per-resolution fees, so you don’t get a surprise bill when you have a busy month. You can start with a flexible monthly plan and cancel anytime, which is a much less risky way to get into powerful automation.

Is Zendesk AI the right choice for you?

Now you know how to enable Zendesk AI, but turning it on is just the first step. The real question is whether it’s the right choice for your team.

For companies where every piece of knowledge lives in a spotless Zendesk Help Center and the automation needs are simple, the native tools might be enough to add a little value.

But for most support teams, knowledge is scattered everywhere, workflows are specific, and being in control is non-negotiable. The walled-off nature of Zendesk’s AI, paired with its tricky setup and confusing pricing, often ends up creating more problems than it solves.

This video provides a helpful guide on getting started with the essential Zendesk AI agents.

A platform like eesel AI offers a modern approach. By acting as a smart, flexible layer on top of the helpdesk you already use, it gives you the power to automate support using all of your company knowledge. And you can get it done in minutes, with the control you need to scale up when you’re ready.

Ready to see what a truly powerful AI for Zendesk looks like?

Get started with eesel AI for free and you can have your first AI agent live in under 5 minutes.