A practical guide to using Zendesk AI to expand content

If you’re on a support team, you know the drill. You’re under pressure to deliver answers that are fast, accurate, consistent, and genuinely helpful. It’s a lot to juggle. Generative AI has shown up promising to lighten the load by helping create and polish support content on the fly.

Zendesk has its own built-in generative AI tools for this, with features that can flesh out an agent's quick notes or change a message's tone with a click. For teams just starting to explore AI, these tools are a decent entry point.

But are they really enough? Let's walk through what the Zendesk AI Expand Content features can do, look at some of their real-world limitations, and see how you can plug in a more powerful AI layer to get true content automation without ditching your current setup.

What is the Zendesk AI Expand Content feature?

The Zendesk AI Expand Content feature isn't just one button. It’s a set of generative AI writing tools built right into the Zendesk Agent Workspace and the help center editor. You’ll typically find them under an "Enhance writing" menu, often as part of Zendesk's Copilot offering.

The whole point is to give your team a bit of AI help right where they're already working, so they don’t have to jump over to another app. The main tools you'll see are:

• Expand: This is the headliner. It takes a few bullet points or a short phrase and turns it into a complete, well-written paragraph. It’s meant to convert an agent's shorthand into a polished, customer-ready reply.

• Simplify: If you’ve got a piece of text that’s a bit dense, technical, or just too long, this tool cuts it down to the core message, making it easier to understand.

• Change Tone: This lets you adjust the writing style for different situations. The most common choices are making the text more "friendly" for a casual chat or more "formal" for a serious, professional response.

The goal here is simple: help agents move faster, keep the brand voice consistent in every conversation, and make writing knowledge base articles a little less painful. It's worth noting that these features are usually part of Zendesk's more expensive "Suite" plans or require buying the Copilot add-on, which we'll get into a bit later.

Key use cases for the Zendesk AI Expand Content feature

These AI writing assistants pop up in a couple of key places: building out your public knowledge base and improving the daily back-and-forth between agents and customers.

Enhancing help center articles with Zendesk AI Expand Content

Picture this: a product expert jots down the basic steps for a new feature in a few bullet points. A content manager can then use the "Expand" feature to spin up a first draft of a help center article. This can definitely save some time compared to starting from a blank page.

But while this makes the writing part faster, it doesn’t help with a bigger question: what articles should you be writing in the first place? It's a tool that helps you write content you've already decided you need.

A more proactive way to handle this is to let your customer conversations guide you. A tool like eesel AI does this by analyzing your past Zendesk tickets to spot the most common questions that don't have a good answer yet. It can even generate draft articles based on the solutions your best agents have already figured out, so your help center is always focused on what customers are actually asking.

eesel AI analyzing past tickets to identify knowledge gaps and suggest new articles, a proactive alternative to the Zendesk AI Expand Content feature.

Assisting agents with ticket replies using Zendesk AI Expand Content

For agents in the thick of it, the ability to expand content can feel like a handy shortcut. An agent can type a quick note like "refund processed 5-7 days" and use the "Expand" feature to instantly get a complete, polite, and on-brand reply. This is especially helpful for getting new agents up to speed and making sure everyone sounds like they work for the same company.

The catch, however, is that Zendesk's tool only helps with the wording of the reply. The agent still has to know the right answer and type it in first. It’s a tool for style, not for substance.

A more advanced solution, like the Copilot from eesel AI, takes this a crucial step further. Instead of just rephrasing what an agent already wrote, it drafts the entire correct answer from scratch. It pulls this off by learning from all your past tickets, macros, and connected knowledge sources like Confluence or Google Docs. This gives agents the complete solution, not just a nicer way of saying what they already know.

The eesel AI Copilot drafting a complete, substantive response inside a help desk, going beyond the rephrasing capabilities of Zendesk AI Expand Content.

Generating article and ticket summaries with Zendesk AI Expand Content

Zendesk's AI can also summarize long ticket threads, which is useful when an agent is taking over a case and needs to get caught up. It can do the same for help center articles, creating a quick intro summary.

This saves agents from reading through long histories, which is a clear win. But reading a summary is still a manual step in a process that could be completely automated. The real goal isn't just to help agents handle tickets faster; it's to get rid of the need to handle certain tickets at all. An AI Agent from eesel AI doesn't just summarize a problem for an agent, it uses its understanding of all your company knowledge to solve the issue on its own, often closing the ticket before it ever lands in an agent's queue.

Limitations of the Zendesk AI Expand Content feature

While Zendesk's writing tools are a nice little feature, leaning on them as your entire AI strategy leaves some pretty big gaps in knowledge, context, and control.

Your knowledge is trapped in Zendesk

Here's the biggest problem with Zendesk's built-in AI: it mostly learns from content that lives inside your Zendesk Help Center. But where does the rest of your company’s brain live? For most businesses, critical info is spread all over the place, like internal wikis in Confluence, how-to guides in Google Docs, or product updates in Notion. Zendesk’s AI can’t see any of that, leading to half-answers and agents who still have to go digging for information.

This is exactly the problem eesel AI was built to fix. With over 100 one-click integrations, it connects all those scattered knowledge sources. By linking your help desk with your wikis and documents, you give your AI a complete view of your business, so it can provide accurate and thorough answers every time.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects scattered knowledge sources, overcoming the limitations of the Zendesk AI Expand Content feature.

It lacks a real-time understanding of conversations

A common frustration for Zendesk users is that its AI often just looks at the first message in a ticket. If a customer's problem changes, their mood shifts from happy to angry, or they ask a follow-up question, the AI can miss it entirely. It’s a static analysis that just can't keep up with how real conversations flow.

In contrast, eesel AI is designed to analyze the full conversation as it happens. It reads every new message to understand what the customer needs now. This lets it adapt its answers, make better decisions about when to escalate an issue, and provide information that’s actually relevant to the latest turn in the conversation.

You have limited control and customization

Zendesk's AI gives you tones like "friendly" and "formal," but what if your brand voice is more "witty and helpful" or "reassuring and technical"? You're stuck with their options. Even worse, its automation is rigid. You can't easily teach it to perform custom, multi-step tasks, like checking an order status in Shopify and then tagging the ticket based on what it finds.

eesel AI puts you in the driver's seat. Its customizable workflow engine lets you define a unique AI persona that perfectly matches your brand's voice. More importantly, you can create custom actions. This lets your AI connect to other systems to look up order details, process refunds, or create a new ticket in Jira. It turns your AI from a simple text rephraser into an agent that actually gets things done.

The eesel AI interface for setting up custom actions and a unique AI persona, highlighting the flexibility missing from the Zendesk AI Expand Content tools.

Zendesk AI Expand Content pricing: What to expect

Alright, let's talk money. Zendesk's pricing for its AI features is layered and can be a bit tricky to figure out. While some basic AI tools are included in their standard "Suite" plans, the more powerful generative features for expanding content require buying the Copilot add-on. For more advanced automation, like smart triage that sorts incoming tickets, you need a separate Advanced AI add-on.

This can get expensive, quickly. The Advanced AI add-on alone is $50 per agent, per month. The Suite plans that include the baseline AI start at $55 per agent, per month (if you pay annually). Since the cost is tied to each agent, your bill grows every time you hire someone, making it tough to scale your team without your software budget ballooning.

eesel AI offers a more straightforward and predictable alternative that’s designed to scale with your needs, not your headcount.

Feature	Zendesk AI	eesel AI
Pricing Model	Confusing tiers + per-agent add-ons	Transparent plans based on usage
Hidden Costs	Costs scale directly with every new agent	Predictable, no per-resolution fees
Onboarding	Often requires sales calls and a long setup	Fully self-serve, go live in minutes
Plan Flexibility	Annual commitment for the best price	Flexible monthly plans you can cancel anytime

The better way to automate your content beyond the Zendesk AI Expand Content feature

Zendesk's content expansion tools are a useful feature for giving agents a writing hand, but they aren't a complete AI solution. They don’t solve the core problems of scattered knowledge, a lack of real-time understanding, or the need for automation that actually completes tasks.

eesel AI is the smart, flexible AI layer that connects smoothly with your existing Zendesk setup to fill all of these gaps. It improves the tools you already use without forcing you to switch to a whole new platform. With eesel AI, you get:

• Go live in minutes, not months: The setup is completely self-serve. You can connect your knowledge sources and launch your AI without ever having to talk to a salesperson.

• Unify all your knowledge: Instantly connect Zendesk with Confluence, Google Docs, Slack, and dozens of other tools to give your AI the full picture.

• Test with confidence: Use the simulation mode to test your AI on thousands of your own past tickets and see exactly what the ROI will be before you turn it on for live customers.

• Total control: Customize everything from the AI's personality and voice to the specific actions it can take in other systems.

The eesel AI simulation mode, which allows teams to test their AI's performance and ROI on past tickets before going live.

Stop wrestling with siloed knowledge and rigid AI. See what’s possible when your AI can access all your information and work exactly the way you want it to.

Try eesel AI for free to see it in action on your own tickets, or book a quick demo with our team.