A 2025 guide to Zendesk AI agents: Features, pricing & a better alternative

It feels like every week there’s a new AI tool promising to fix customer support for good. Zendesk, of course, is right in the mix. The pitch is always tempting: instant answers for customers and a support team that can finally breathe and focus on the really tricky problems.

But if you’ve been looking into it, you’ve probably noticed that the reality of setting up these tools is often a lot clunkier than the slick marketing demos. This is especially true when the AI feels like it was tacked on as an afterthought to your help desk, not built for how your team actually works.

This guide is an honest look at Zendesk AI agents. We’ll walk through the features, what it really takes to get them running, the slightly confusing pricing, and the common walls teams hit. We’ll also look at a more flexible way to bring AI into the Zendesk workflow you already know and love.

What are Zendesk AI agents?

First things first, "Zendesk AI" isn’t a single product. It’s really a bundle of different features and add-ons meant to automate parts of your support process and give your human agents a hand. When people talk about it, they’re usually referring to two main things: AI Agents and Copilot.

Zendesk AI agents (essential vs. advanced)

This is Zendesk’s main tool for handling automated conversations with customers. It’s broken into two levels, and the difference between them is pretty significant.

The Essential level comes with all Zendesk plans. It gives you generative AI replies that are powered by the articles in your public help center. Think of it as the starting point. Its ability to answer questions is only as good as your existing knowledge base. If you have gaps in your help articles, the AI will have the same blind spots.

The Advanced level is a paid add-on that unlocks more powerful tools. This is where you can start building custom, multi-step conversation flows, connecting to other software with APIs, and digging into more detailed analytics. It’s where the real power is meant to be, but it’s also where things get a lot more complicated.

Zendesk Copilot

Zendesk Copilot isn’t a bot that talks to your customers. Instead, it’s more like an AI assistant that sits on your human agent’s shoulder, helping them work faster.

It can summarize long, winding ticket threads so agents can get up to speed quickly. It also suggests replies based on your knowledge base and past tickets, and can even help agents tweak the tone of a response, maybe shifting from formal to friendly with a click. It’s a tool for boosting your team’s productivity, not for full automation, and it comes with its own separate price per agent.

Setting up Zendesk AI agents: The hidden challenge

Zendesk’s marketing makes it seem like you can get an AI agent up and running in a few minutes. A quick scroll through user forums and Reddit, however, paints a very different picture. The official setup process looks simple on the surface, but there’s a huge, time-draining step that often gets glossed over.

The official setup process

According to Zendesk’s own documentation, getting started seems pretty straightforward. You’re meant to optimize your help center content, choose which channels the bot should work on (like messaging or email), give it a name and personality, test it out, and then publish it for your customers.

The hidden challenge: The perfect knowledge base

Here’s the catch. That first step, "optimize your help center content," is doing all the work. The single biggest complaint from users is that Zendesk’s AI is almost entirely dependent on having a perfectly organized, complete, and constantly updated knowledge base. If the answer to a customer’s question isn’t written down in a clean help center article, the AI just gives up.

The problem is, that’s not how most companies operate. Your real knowledge is scattered everywhere. It’s in the thousands of resolved tickets your best agents have handled over the years. It’s in internal wikis on Confluence. It’s in process documents buried somewhere in Google Docs. Manually moving all of that vital information into a pristine Zendesk help center isn’t a small job; it can be a months-long project that pulls your team away from their actual work.

This is a massive roadblock. You shouldn’t have to completely rebuild your knowledge management system just to make an AI work. The alternative is a tool designed for your existing, messy reality. A platform like eesel AI connects with Zendesk in one click and can instantly learn from your past tickets and plug into all your other knowledge sources. It lets you go live in minutes, not months, because it works with the information you already have, wherever it happens to be.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects with various knowledge sources like Zendesk, Confluence, and Google Docs to provide comprehensive answers, a more flexible approach than native Zendesk AI agents.

Key features and common limitations

While Zendesk AI has some useful features, many teams quickly find themselves bumping up against practical limits that get in the way of really great performance. Here’s a breakdown of what it can do and where it tends to fall short.

Limited knowledge sources

Zendesk AI agents, especially the Essential version, are built to pull answers almost exclusively from your Zendesk Guide help center.

This basically puts blinders on your AI. It’s completely unaware of the valuable information hidden in your past ticket resolutions, internal checklists, or developer wikis. This leads to half-answers and frustrated customers who know you’ve solved their problem before. <quote text="As one user on Reddit said, the AI's effectiveness "really depends on having a perfectly curated [Zendesk knowledge base]," which for most teams is just not realistic." sourceIcon="https://www.iconpacks.net/icons/2/free-reddit-logo-icon-2436-thumb.png" sourceName="Reddit" sourceLink="https://reddit.com">

A modern AI tool should bring all your company’s knowledge together, not make you centralize it by hand. eesel AI instantly connects to dozens of sources, learning from your team’s best work wherever it is, from historical tickets in Zendesk to procedural docs in Notion.

Rigid and clunky workflows

With the Advanced AI Agent, you can build custom conversation flows to guide customers through more complex problems.

The issue is, users report that the interface for building these flows is frustrating and inflexible. <quote text="The whole feature feels "bolted on," disconnected from where agents do their actual work." sourceIcon="https://www.iconpacks.net/icons/2/free-reddit-logo-icon-2436-thumb.png" sourceName="Reddit" sourceLink="https://www.reddit.com/r/Zendesk/comments/1ic53my/zendesk_ai_agents_after_thought/">

This forces your team to do extra clicks and constantly switch between different screens, which slows them down instead of speeding them up. <quote text="One user bluntly described creating a custom answer flow as "the most annoying interface in the world."" sourceIcon="https://www.iconpacks.net/icons/2/free-reddit-logo-icon-2436-thumb.png" sourceName="Reddit" sourceLink="https://reddit.com">

You need an AI workflow tool that’s both powerful and simple to use. With a visual editor like the one in eesel AI, you can define exactly what the AI should handle, its tone of voice, and what custom actions it can take (like looking up an order status in Shopify), giving you full control without the headache.

A workflow diagram showing the simple, visual interface of eesel AI for creating custom automation, contrasting with the clunky workflows of Zendesk AI agents.

Lack of confident testing and reporting

Zendesk provides dashboards that let you see how your AI is doing after it goes live.

Unfortunately, there’s no good way to simulate how the AI will perform before you unleash it on your customers. You have to launch it and cross your fingers, which is a stressful way to test new technology. On top of that, users have pointed out that you can’t easily export conversation data to analyze trends or figure out what’s missing from your knowledge base.

You shouldn’t have to test on live customers. eesel AI’s simulation mode runs on thousands of your past tickets, giving you an accurate forecast of how many questions it can resolve and highlighting areas for improvement, all before a single customer interacts with it.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which allows teams to test performance on historical data before going live, a feature lacking in Zendesk AI agents.

Understanding Zendesk AI agents pricing

Zendesk’s pricing for its AI features can be a bit of a maze. It’s split across different add-ons that use different billing models, which can lead to unpredictable costs that creep up as your support volume grows. Let’s untangle it.

Zendesk Copilot pricing

Copilot, the tool that helps your agents, is the more straightforward part of the pricing puzzle.

• Cost: $50 per agent per month (at full price).

This is a flat fee, but it applies to all of your agents, whether they use it a lot or just once in a while. For a team of 50, that’s an extra $2,500 on your bill every single month.

Zendesk AI agents pricing

This is where it gets tricky. The customer-facing AI Agents are priced based on "Automated Resolutions" (ARs), which is any conversation resolved by the AI without a human ever getting involved.

Every Zendesk Suite plan comes with a tiny number of free ARs each month. For instance, the Suite Team plan includes just 5 ARs per agent. After you use those, you start paying for every single additional resolution. This pay-as-you-go model makes budgeting a nightmare, because your monthly bill is tied directly to your ticket volume and how well the AI is performing.

The strange part is, this pricing model can feel like it punishes you for success. If you actually manage to automate a large chunk of your support, you could be hit with a surprisingly large bill at the end of the month.

Plan	Included ARs (per agent/month)	Pay-as-you-go Cost per AR
Suite Team	5	$2.00
Suite Professional	10	$2.00
Suite Enterprise	15	$2.00

A better approach: Supercharging Zendesk with eesel AI

Instead of fighting with the limits and unpredictable costs of a native AI, you can layer a more powerful and flexible solution right on top of the help desk you already use. Here’s how eesel AI compares to Zendesk’s built-in tools.

Zendesk AI agents vs. eesel AI

Feature	Zendesk Native AI	eesel AI for Zendesk
Setup Time	Days to weeks (requires KB overhaul)	Minutes (connects to existing knowledge)
Knowledge Sources	Primarily Zendesk help center	Past tickets, help center, Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Slack & 100+ more
Customization	Rigid flows, limited actions	Fully customizable prompts, persona, and custom API actions
Testing	Limited to post-launch monitoring	Powerful simulation on historical tickets
Pricing Model	Per-agent fees + unpredictable per-resolution costs	Transparent, predictable plans with no per-resolution fees

The bottom line is that eesel AI is built to be easy to set up yourself, completely controllable, and smoothly integrated. It lets you test with confidence and offers a clear pricing model that won’t penalize you for growing.

Move beyond the bolt-on feel of Zendesk AI agents

Zendesk is a fantastic help desk, but its native AI features can feel like a rushed, "bolt-on" solution. The heavy reliance on a perfect knowledge base, clunky workflows, and a confusing, unpredictable pricing model can create more problems than they solve.

Truly helpful AI automation should adapt to your workflows, not force you to change how you work. It should connect all your existing knowledge, give you precise control, and let you roll out changes without guessing.

Instead of wrestling with a rigid, built-in tool, you might want to look at a solution that layers on top of your current setup to deliver value right away.

See how easy it can be. You can try eesel AI for free and have a working AI agent trained on your actual company knowledge in just a few minutes.