Zendesk AI agents: How they work, their limits, and better alternatives in 2025
Stevia Putri
Stanley Nicholas
Last edited November 12, 2025
Expert Verified
If you're in customer support, you've probably noticed every platform is in a full-blown AI arms race. Zendesk is right in the mix, tacking on new features and buying up companies to keep pace. But if you’re actually using Zendesk day-to-day, you might be feeling what
Plenty of teams find themselves fighting with a system that feels more like an add-on than a core part of their workflow. If that sounds familiar, you're in the right place. We’re going to take an honest look at Zendesk AI agents, how they work, where things get messy in the real world, and how newer, properly integrated alternatives can give you a much smoother path to automation.
What is Zendesk AI?
First off, "Zendesk AI" isn't a single thing you can buy. It's more of a bundle of features, some they built themselves and others they acquired, all layered on top of their main help desk software. This is a big reason it can feel so disconnected. Here’s what you're actually working with.
AI agents for handling conversations
This is Zendesk's chatbot tool. It’s meant to deflect common, repetitive questions that come in through messaging, email, or your web contact form. It uses generative AI to have a simple conversation, and if it gets confused, it's supposed to hand the ticket over to a human. It's broken into "Essential" and "Advanced" plans, and of course, the really useful stuff, like building custom conversation flows or connecting to your other systems, is locked away in the pricier plan.
Agent copilot to help your human team
This is the AI assistant that sits inside your agent's workspace. The idea is to make your team faster by helping them with their daily tasks. It can suggest replies based on old tickets, summarize long customer emails so agents can get up to speed quickly, and even tweak the tone of a message from casual to formal. Think of it less as a true automation tool and more like a helpful sidekick that offers tips your team can take or leave.
A real-world look at Zendesk AI (and where it falls short)
On paper, the feature list for Zendesk AI sounds pretty good. But once you start trying to set it up and use it, you can hit a few walls that make it tough to get your money's worth.
The complicated setup
Getting Zendesk AI running isn't exactly a one-click affair. To get the full toolkit, you usually have to be on a premium Zendesk Suite plan and then pay extra for the "Advanced AI" add-on. As many users have discovered, actually setting it up, especially the custom answer flows, can be a real headache. The interface isn't the most intuitive, and a lot of teams end up having to hire a Zendesk partner or reseller just to get it off the ground.
Help center dependency: A key flaw
The smarts of Zendesk's AI depend almost entirely on you having a perfectly organized, complete, and constantly updated Zendesk knowledge base. If your help articles are flawless, it works okay. But let's be honest, whose are? While it can now learn from past tickets, its core design wasn't built to pull information from all the other places your team's knowledge actually lives. We’re talking about those messy internal documents in Confluence, shared project plans in Google Docs, or random, helpful Slack threads. This creates a huge knowledge gap for any team whose expertise is spread across different tools.
The confusing pricing model
This is a big one. Zendesk’s AI pricing structure can feel like a double whammy, making it one of the more expensive and unpredictable options on the market. First, you pay a flat fee per agent for the Copilot features. Then, you pay again for every single ticket the AI manages to resolve on its own. This pay-per-resolution model sounds fair at first, but it makes budgeting a nightmare. A busy month with lots of simple questions could result in a surprisingly high bill.
| Cost Component | Price | What it Covers | The Catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copilot Add-on | $50 / agent / month | Agent-assist features like suggested replies and summaries. | This is a fixed cost for all your agents, whether they use it a lot or a little. |
| Automated Resolutions | $1.50 - $2.00 / resolution | Charged every time the AI closes a ticket without a human touching it. | Your monthly bill can swing wildly, making it hard to forecast costs. |
The "bolted-on" problem
The fundamental issue is simple: Zendesk is a great help desk that tried to add AI to a system that wasn't built for it. This "bolted-on" approach creates friction that modern, AI-native platforms just don't have.
A clunky agent experience
Because Zendesk’s AI is a mix of acquired tools (like Ultimate.ai) and new features built on an older foundation, the experience for agents isn't smooth. They often have to open a separate "Intelligence" panel or click through confusing flow-builder screens just to use the AI. This constant context-switching slows them down instead of speeding them up. It’s an interruption, not a true integration.
Knowledge silos: A key limitation
A bolted-on system struggles to act as a single source of truth for your company. It can read its own help center just fine, but it wasn't designed to instantly connect to and learn from everywhere else your institutional knowledge is stored. Getting it to understand the context from your team's internal Notion wiki or pull info from a shared drive is a huge technical lift. This really limits its ability to answer complex questions, meaning more tickets get escalated back to your human agents.
An infographic illustrating how eesel AI centralizes knowledge from different sources to power support automation, a key alternative to how Zendesk AI agents work.The inability to test: A major risk
One of the biggest missing pieces in Zendesk’s AI is a way to properly test it before you unleash it on your customers. There's no simulation mode that lets you see how the AI would have handled your past support tickets. You pretty much have to turn it on and hope for the best, which is a big risk when your customer experience is on the line. Without a way to simulate its performance, it's hard to build trust in the AI, predict its actual impact, or make a case for the investment to your leadership.
The better alternative
If the challenges with Zendesk's bolted-on AI feel all too familiar, the good news is there’s a much better way to do things. Modern platforms like eesel AI were built from the ground up to be a smart layer that works seamlessly with the tools you already use, including Zendesk. It’s designed to fix the exact problems that older systems create.
This video explains how a modern AI assistant can replace Zendesk's Advanced AI, offering a more integrated and efficient solution.
Go live in minutes, not months
Forget about sitting through long onboarding calls or mandatory demos. eesel AI is designed to be completely self-serve. You can connect it to your Zendesk account with a single click and get a basic AI agent running over your helpdesk for free in a few minutes. There’s no complex setup or need for developers, which is a world away from the complicated, partner-heavy process in the Zendesk ecosystem.
Unify your knowledge instantly
This is where you'll see the biggest difference. eesel AI was built to be your company's central brain. It connects to all your knowledge sources right out of the box, not just your help articles. It learns from your past Zendesk tickets, Confluence pages, Google Docs, Notion docs, and more. It can even analyze your best human-led ticket resolutions and automatically draft new articles for your knowledge base, helping you fill information gaps with content you already know works.
This infographic visualizes how eesel AI unifies knowledge from various sources, providing a clear alternative to the limitations of Zendesk AI agents.
Test with confidence in simulation mode
eesel AI takes all the guesswork out of launching an AI agent. Its simulation mode lets you run the AI on thousands of your past tickets in a safe environment. You can see exactly how it would have replied, what knowledge it used to find the answer, and get an accurate prediction of your resolution rate and cost savings. This lets you fine-tune its behavior and feel completely confident before a single customer ever talks to it.
A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation feature, which allows for safe testing, a key advantage when considering alternatives to Zendesk AI.Get full control with predictable pricing
With eesel AI's workflow engine, you get to decide exactly which types of tickets the AI handles. You can start small by automating simple "where is my order?" questions and have it pass everything else to your team. More importantly, the pricing is simple. It’s based on a set number of monthly AI interactions, not a confusing per-resolution fee. This gives you a predictable monthly cost that doesn't go up just because your support volume does.
A screenshot of eesel AI's transparent pricing page, an important factor for those exploring alternatives to Zendesk AI.Moving beyond bolted-on AI
Zendesk is a solid help desk, but its approach to AI has all the hallmarks of new tech being forced onto an old platform. The result is often a clunky experience, siloed knowledge, and a pricing model that’s both expensive and unpredictable.
You don't have to settle for a bolted-on solution. Modern, integrated platforms like eesel AI are built to provide a seamless, self-serve experience that unifies your company knowledge and gives you the tools to automate with real confidence. It works with the help desk you already have, making it smarter instead of forcing you to switch.
Ready to see what an integrated AI platform can do? Connect eesel AI to your Zendesk account in minutes and run a free simulation on your past tickets, or book a personalized demo with our team to learn more.
Frequently asked questions
Zendesk AI offers features like chatbots and agent copilots, but the blog suggests its "bolted-on" nature leads to complex setup, fragmented knowledge, and unpredictable costs. Newer, integrated alternatives are emerging that address these pain points by offering smoother automation and unified knowledge.
Setting up Zendesk AI can be complicated, often requiring premium plans and additional add-ons. The interface for building custom conversation flows isn't always intuitive, leading many teams to seek help from Zendesk partners for proper implementation.
Zendesk's AI was primarily designed to leverage its own knowledge base. It struggles to integrate and learn from other common internal knowledge sources like Confluence or Google Docs, creating significant knowledge gaps for teams whose expertise is spread across various tools.
Zendesk's AI pricing includes a fixed monthly fee per agent for Copilot features, plus an additional charge for every ticket the AI resolves autonomously. This "pay-per-resolution" model makes budgeting unpredictable, as a busy month with more resolutions can significantly increase your bill.
The "bolted-on" problem refers to Zendesk's AI being added to an older platform not originally designed for deep AI integration. This often results in a clunky agent experience, where agents need to switch contexts or open separate panels to use AI features, hindering rather than streamlining their workflow.
A significant limitation with Zendesk's AI is the lack of a robust simulation mode. This means you generally can't test how the AI would handle past tickets or reliably predict its resolution rate and cost savings before it goes live with customers, posing a risk to customer experience.
