Zendesk AI agent conversation transcripts: The complete 2025 guide

So, your team is using AI agents. They're handling customer chats, and that's great, but it can feel a bit like a black box. You know conversations are happening, but are they any good? How do you even begin to figure out what's working and what isn't?

Zendesk recently tried to address this by turning AI conversations into tickets, hoping to give support managers a clearer view.

This guide will walk you through what Zendesk AI agent conversation transcripts are, how this new ticketing feature actually works, where it falls short, and how you can go from just seeing conversations to getting real, useful insights from your support data.

What are Zendesk AI agent conversation transcripts?

For a long time, keeping tabs on conversations handled only by a Zendesk AI agent was a real headache. The transcripts were buried in the Admin Center, would disappear after just 30 days, and often took ages to even show up. This made it pretty much impossible for managers to check on the AI's performance or understand what kinds of problems it was solving on its own.

Late last year, Zendesk rolled out an update to fix this by creating AI agent tickets. Here’s the gist of it:

• AI chats now become tickets: Any conversation that an AI agent handles from start to finish (without a human stepping in) now shows up as a ticket in the Agent Workspace.

• They’re read-only: Think of these tickets as a record, not something to work on. Agents can't add comments, use macros, or change any ticket details unless the chat gets escalated.

• A little more context for humans: If a customer has a chat that does get escalated, the human agent can now see the customer’s past AI-only chats in their history. It gives them a bit more background.

It's a step in the right direction for transparency, but as you'll see, just being able to see the transcripts isn't the same as being able to do something useful with them.

Where Zendesk's native tools fall short

While seeing AI conversations as tickets is better than nothing, Zendesk’s built-in tools create some major hurdles for teams that want to use this data to improve things. You get a window to look through, but no tools to actually fix what you see.

Limited functionality and clunky workflows

The biggest issue with Zendesk's setup is that these AI agent tickets are completely passive. They're read-only, and more importantly, they don't trigger any automations or business rules.

This means you can't use Zendesk's own tools to do basic things like:

• Automatically tag chats based on the topic.

• Flag a conversation for a human to review if the customer seems upset.

• Send a follow-up survey unless a human agent gets involved.

This limitation effectively traps your AI conversations in their own little world, cut off from the workflows you use to manage everything else. In contrast, a tool like eesel AI plugs right into your help desk and runs workflows for you. It can automatically sort and tag tickets and perform custom actions based on what was said, turning that passive data into active improvements.

No way to export or analyze transcripts in bulk

If you browse Zendesk's community forums, you'll see a common request: the ability to export messaging transcripts in bulk. This was possible with their old Live Chat product, but it's gone missing for modern messaging.

Without an export feature, you're stuck. You can't easily:

• Run a large-scale analysis to find out what customers are asking about most often.

• Use the transcript data to train a more tailored AI model.

• Share trends with other teams, like product or marketing, so they can learn from customer feedback.

Let's be honest, nobody has time to review transcripts one-by-one in the Zendesk interface. It just doesn't work once you have a real volume of conversations.

Disconnected and delayed reporting

Zendesk's reporting for AI performance is split up and slow. The new AI agent tickets don't show up in Zendesk Explore, the main analytics tool. Instead, you have to go to the Admin Center, where the data can be delayed by up to 72 hours.

This fragmented approach makes it tough to get a clear, up-to-date picture of your whole support operation. You can’t easily compare your AI agent's performance to your human agents in one dashboard. With a tool like eesel AI, the analytics not only track everything in real-time but also point you toward actions you can take, like identifying gaps in your knowledge base that are causing chats to be escalated.

A better way to use your conversation transcripts

To really get value from your AI conversation data, you need to go from just looking at it to actively automating with it. That means you need a tool that works with Zendesk to make it better, not one that's held back by its limitations.

Unify all your knowledge, not just help articles

A truly helpful AI learns from your entire company's knowledge, not just a handful of public articles. The best answers often come from looking at everything your team already knows. This is where a solution like eesel AI really shines. It connects to your Zendesk tickets and help center, but it also pulls information from all your other knowledge sources with simple, one-click integrations:

• Past tickets: It analyzes thousands of your team's past conversations to learn your tone of voice and find common solutions.

• Internal wikis: It connects to places like Confluence and Google Docs to pull answers from the documents your team uses internally.

• Macros and saved replies: It learns from the shortcuts and canned responses your best agents use to solve problems quickly.

By bringing all this knowledge together, the AI can give much more accurate and relevant answers, which means you'll spend less time digging through transcripts to figure out why it's failing.

Test with your own data before you go live

How do you know if a change you make to your AI will actually help? With Zendesk’s native tools, you don't. You just have to make the change, cross your fingers, and hope for the best.

A much smarter way is to use a simulation. eesel AI has a simulation mode that tests its AI against thousands of your actual past Zendesk tickets. Before you ever turn it on for customers, you get a detailed report showing:

• Which tickets it would have solved automatically.

• The exact response it would have given in every case.

• A clear forecast of your potential automation rate and cost savings.

This lets you build and fine-tune your AI without any risk, so you can go live with confidence.

Automate actions, not just answers

The whole point of an AI agent is to solve problems, and sometimes that takes more than just a good answer. It requires taking action. An integrated AI should be able to trigger workflows right inside your help desk.

With eesel AI, you can build a workflow engine that lets the AI:

• Triage tickets: Automatically add tags, set the right priority, and fill in ticket fields.

• Look up live info: Use API actions to check an order status in Shopify or find customer details in your own database.

• Escalate smartly: Send tricky issues to the right human agent or department based on what the customer is asking.

This transforms your AI from a simple chatbot into an agent that actually gets work done.

graph TD  

    A[Customer sends a message] --> B{eesel AI analyzes the transcript};  

    B --> C{Order status?};  

    C -->|Yes| D[API call to Shopify];
    D --> E[Provide order status];  

    C -->|No| F{Urgent issue?};
    F -->|Yes| G[Escalate to human agent];
    F -->|No| H[Answer from knowledge base];

A quick look at Zendesk AI pricing

Zendesk bundles some basic AI features in its Suite Team plan (which starts at $55 per agent, per month). But the more powerful tools you need for real analysis and automation, like the Copilot and Advanced AI Agents, are paid add-ons.

This means the price to get the full AI toolkit can jump up quickly, and it's often based on how many human agents you have. When looking at your options, it's worth thinking about whether an all-in-one platform with clear, predictable pricing might be a better financial fit for getting the most out of support automation.

This video explains how Zendesk's AI-powered transcripts and summaries can boost agent productivity.

Go from seeing transcripts to taking action

Zendesk making AI conversations visible as tickets is a nice move toward being more transparent. But visibility isn't enough. The native tools just don't have the power for the deep analysis, workflow automation, and confident tweaking that modern support teams need.

To turn your Zendesk AI agent conversation transcripts from a simple log into a source of real intelligence, you need a tool that builds on what your help desk can do. eesel AI plugs directly into Zendesk, letting you unify all your knowledge, simulate performance with your own data, and automate entire workflows.

Stop just watching what your AI did yesterday. Start controlling what it can do for you tomorrow. You can go live in minutes, not months, try eesel AI and run a free simulation on your own tickets to see what's possible.