An in-depth Zendesk Advanced AI analysis for support leaders

If you're running a support team, you know the drill: make customers happier and the team more efficient, but don't just hire more people. It's a tough spot to be in. AI is what everyone's talking about as the solution, and if you use Zendesk, their Zendesk Advanced AI add-on probably looks like the obvious choice.

But is it? This Zendesk Advanced AI analysis cuts through the marketing noise. We’ll look at what it actually does, what it costs, and where it falls short, so you can figure out if it's the right move for your team or if you need something more flexible.

What is Zendesk Advanced AI?

First off, Zendesk Advanced AI is a paid add-on for their Suite plans. It's not the same as the basic "Zendesk AI" features that might already be in your plan, like simple bots or macro suggestions. This is where Zendesk keeps its more powerful automation and agent tools.

The main idea is simple: use AI to sort tickets automatically, help agents write better responses with generative tools, and give you a clearer picture of what's happening in your support queue. It’s built to live entirely inside Zendesk, which is both a good thing and, as we'll see, a pretty big drawback.

A detailed analysis: Features vs. reality

Let's get into the main parts of the platform. We’ll see what each feature is supposed to do, where it struggles in the real world, and how a more adaptable tool might be able to help.

Intelligent triage and routing

This is one of the main selling points. The AI is supposed to read incoming emails and webforms, figure out what the customer wants (like a billing question), see what language they're using, and even guess their mood (like 'frustrated'). You can then use this info to automatically send tickets to the right team or trigger other workflows.

Zendesk says this can shave 45 seconds off every ticket because a human doesn't have to read and sort everything. Sounds great, but there are a couple of hitches.

The limitations:

• It doesn't work well for chat. The AI was mainly trained on longer emails. If your team spends most of its time in live chat, where conversations are quick and back-and-forth, the predictions just aren't as accurate.

• It’s a one-size-fits-all model. Zendesk's AI is trained on general business data. That means it can get tripped up by your company's specific slang, product names, or unique customer problems. If your tickets aren't about simple things like 'shipping' or 'password resets,' you might find it sends tickets to the wrong place, which just makes more cleanup work for your team.

A more flexible approach:

Instead of a generic model, a tool like eesel AI connects right into your Zendesk and actually learns from your team's past tickets. It gets up to speed on your specific customer language and business quirks from the get-go. With something like eesel AI’s AI Triage, you get fine-grained control to set up custom routing rules based on whatever you need, ensuring tickets land in the right inbox without relying on a generic guess.

Generative AI for agents (Copilot features)

The Advanced AI package also gives your agents some 'copilot' tools right in their workspace. These tools are meant to help with everyday tasks like summarizing a long ticket thread, turning a few bullet points into a full-on polite email, or tweaking the tone of a message to sound more formal or casual.

The goal is to help every agent work faster, keep your brand voice consistent, and reduce the time spent typing the same things over and over.

A support agent using the reply sugggestion tool from the Zendesk AI Copilot add-on to resolve a customer issue, as part of our Zendesk Advanced AI analysis.

The limitations:

• Your knowledge is trapped. The AI can only look for answers inside Zendesk, like in your help center articles. That's a huge issue for most companies. What about the really important stuff in your internal Confluence wiki, the playbooks in Google Docs, or technical docs somewhere else? If the answer isn't in Zendesk, the AI is stuck.

• It can't actually do anything. Changing the tone of an email is nice, but it doesn't fix the customer's problem. Zendesk's AI can't handle complex tasks that involve multiple steps. For instance, you can't set it up to check an order status in Shopify, find the shipping details, and then write a reply based on that info. All it does is suggest words.

Unifying knowledge for better assistance:

This is where a tool built to connect with everything really makes a difference. The eesel AI Copilot doesn't just stay in your help desk; it taps into your company's knowledge wherever it lives. You can connect it to Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, and dozens of other apps. That means when an agent asks for help, the AI can give them an answer based on everything your company knows.

Even better, eesel AI can be set up to take custom actions. It can make API calls to check an order, update a user's account in your system, or create a ticket in Jira. It gives agents real help, not just writing prompts.

The eesel AI Copilot provides a draft response inside a customer support help desk, demonstrating AI email personalization using internal data for this Zendesk Advanced AI analysis.

Analytics and reporting

Zendesk Advanced AI gives you a pre-built analytics dashboard to track how your agents are using the AI tools. It’s supposed to help you see if it's making a difference to things like first reply time and resolution time.

The idea is to give managers a look at how the new tools are being used and if they're actually helping.

The limitations:

• It’s all looking backward. The reports show you what already happened, but they don't give you much advice on what to do next. It won't point out the gaps in your knowledge base or suggest where you could automate things next.

• You have to pay to play. There's no real way to test how the AI will perform on your own tickets before you sign the contract. You're spending thousands of dollars based on a sales pitch, not on data from your own business.

Testing with confidence and getting actionable insights:

This is a big difference with a platform like eesel AI. It has a simulation mode that lets you test your setup on thousands of your own past tickets before going live. In just a few minutes, you can get a solid, data-backed estimate of how many tickets you could resolve and how much you could save.

Plus, eesel AI's reporting is built to be useful. It doesn't just show you vanity metrics; it finds the holes in your knowledge base and points to the most common tickets that are perfect candidates for automation. It basically gives you a to-do list for getting better.

The eesel AI simulation feature, which provides a safe testing environment for our Zendesk Advanced AI analysis.

Zendesk Advanced AI cost

The pricing for Zendesk Advanced AI is pretty simple, but it's also very rigid. It costs $50 per agent, per month, on top of your Zendesk Suite plan. And you have to pay it for every single agent on your plan, no exceptions.

Let's do some quick math. For a 10-person team, that's an extra $6,000 a year. For a 50-person team, you're looking at a $30,000 yearly bill, on top of what you already pay for Zendesk. This per-person pricing can add up fast, and you pay the same for someone who uses it all day as you do for someone who barely uses it.

This is a big departure from eesel AI's pricing, which is built to be more predictable and fair.

• No per-agent fees

  eesel AI's plans are based on how much you use the AI each month, not how many people are on your team. You pay for what you get, not for your headcount.

• No per-resolution fees

  You won't get a surprise bill if you have a busy month and the AI solves a bunch of tickets.

• Flexible plans

  You can start on a month-to-month plan and leave anytime, which is a nice change from being locked into an annual contract.

Feature	Zendesk Advanced AI	eesel AI
Pricing Model	$50/agent/month (add-on)	Usage-based (not per-agent)
Contract	Typically annual	Monthly and annual plans available
Hidden Fees	None specified	No per-resolution fees
Predictability	Cost scales with headcount	Cost scales with value/usage

The bigger picture: Escaping the walled garden

Look, here’s the bottom line. Zendesk Advanced AI is a decent tool, but it's designed to keep you locked inside the Zendesk world. It works great if all of your company's knowledge and every single one of your support processes already live inside Zendesk.

For most companies today, that’s just not reality. Knowledge is all over the place, in tools like Slack, Confluence, Notion, and Google Drive. By keeping its AI on a leash, Zendesk forces you to either move everything into their system (which is a huge project) or settle for an AI that's working with only a tiny piece of the puzzle.

This video provides a comprehensive walkthrough of Zendesk's Advanced AI capabilities, including intelligent triage and agent assistance tools.

This is where eesel AI has a completely different philosophy. It’s a modern tool that’s built to work with the apps you already use, including Zendesk, without making you change how you work. eesel AI pulls all your scattered knowledge together and gives you a customizable workflow engine so you're in charge. Best of all, you can get it set up yourself in minutes, which is a breath of fresh air compared to the endless sales calls and mandatory demos you get with a lot of enterprise software.

A screenshot of the customization and action workflow screen in eesel AI, a key part of this Zendesk Advanced AI analysis.

Should you get Zendesk Advanced AI?

After this Zendesk Advanced AI analysis, it’s pretty clear that the platform is a solid choice for a very specific kind of team. It might be right for you if your team is all-in on the Zendesk platform with no desire to use other tools, handles almost all support through email, and deals with problems that fit nicely into Zendesk's generalist AI models.

But if your team needs flexibility, wants to customize how things work, prefers predictable pricing, and needs an AI that can tap into knowledge from your entire tech stack, then a more open and agile tool is going to be a much better fit.

See what a flexible AI can do for your Zendesk team

Zendesk is a great help desk, but its native AI can be rigid and expensive. eesel AI connects right into your current setup to give you powerful, customizable automation that learns from all of your company's knowledge.

Don't just take our word for it. You can run a free, no-risk simulation on your own Zendesk ticket history and see what your automation rate and savings could be in minutes.

Try the eesel AI simulation for free