A practical guide to the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard in 2025

Getting AI set up in your customer support workflow is one thing. But the real work? That comes next. You have to prove it’s worth the investment, figure out if it's actually helping your team, and use real data to make it smarter over time. It’s the difference between having a cool new toy and having a tool that gives you a real edge.

If your team uses Zendesk, the go-to tool for this is the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard. It's built to give you a peek into how your agents are using the native AI features that come with Zendesk.

But here’s the million-dollar question: is it giving you the whole story? This guide will walk you through what the dashboard can do, what it measures, and, more importantly, where it comes short. We’ll look at what it does well and then explore what a more complete, useful approach to AI analytics actually looks like.

What is the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard?

In a nutshell, the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard is a set of pre-made reports inside the larger Zendesk Explore analytics tool. Its main job is to keep an eye on the usage and performance of Zendesk’s own generative AI tools, which you typically get with the Copilot add-on.

Think of it as the built-in report card for Zendesk’s AI. It's there to help support managers see how their team is using features like ticket summarization, expanding text, or changing the tone of a reply. From there, the dashboard tries to connect that usage to standard support metrics like First Reply Time (FRT) and Full Resolution Time.

It’s really important to get one thing straight from the start: this isn't some all-seeing AI analytics tool. It’s a closed system. It’s designed only to track the performance of Zendesk's own AI add-ons. It has no idea what’s going on with more advanced third-party AI agents, and it definitely can’t tell you how your AI is using knowledge from outside the Zendesk ecosystem.

Key features and metrics of the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard

Before we dive into its weak spots, let's give credit where it's due and look at what the dashboard offers straight out of the box. The data is split into two main buckets: how your agents are using the tools, and how that use seems to affect ticket stats.

Agent engagement reports

This part of the dashboard is all about usage. It’s there to answer the simple questions: "Is my team even touching these AI features?" and "If they are, which ones are they using most?"

The main things it tracks are:

• Summaries generated: A simple count of how many times an agent hit the "summarize" button on a ticket.

• Messages expanded: The number of times agents used AI to flesh out a short note into a fuller response.

• Tone shifts: A tally of how many times agents used the "make friendly" or "make formal" options.

You'll see this data in things like a pie chart showing the percentage of tickets that had some AI involvement or a bar chart listing the top 10 agents by AI tool usage. It’s a pretty basic way to see if the features you're paying for are collecting dust or not.

Ticket metrics reports

This is where the dashboard tries to connect the dots between your team using AI and your team being more efficient. It’s meant to answer that big question from your boss: "Is this AI thing actually making us faster?"

Here are the key reports managers often check:

• Full resolution time on Generative AI tickets: This graph compares the average time it takes to solve a ticket when AI was used versus when it wasn't.

• Generative AI tool usage vs requester wait time: Another graph that shows the average time a customer had to wait for an answer on tickets where AI lent a hand.

These reports pull their data from a dataset focused on Zendesk's generative AI tools.

Metric Category	Example Metrics	What It Tells You
Usage Counts	Summarize ticket, Expand text, Tone shift	The raw numbers on how often your team uses specific AI features.
Ticket Times	Full resolution time (min), First reply time (min)	The supposed link between using AI features and your core efficiency stats.
Ticket Counts	Tickets - AI used, Tickets - No AI	A simple split of how many tickets involved an AI assist versus those that didn't.
Satisfaction	% Satisfaction score	A high-level look at whether AI usage correlates with customer satisfaction.

Where the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard falls short

While the dashboard gives you a basic starting point, support leaders who are serious about understanding their AI's true performance will quickly find its limits. These built-in restrictions can give you misleading data and stop you from getting the insights you need to actually make improvements.

It only measures Zendesk's AI

This is the big one. The dashboard is a walled garden. It can only see and measure what Zendesk’s own AI tools are doing.

Let's say you bring in a more powerful, third-party AI agent that can resolve tickets on its own by connecting to all your company's knowledge. The Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard will be completely blind to it. It won't see the resolutions, the customer interactions, or the impact on your metrics. Your analytics are stuck in Zendesk's world, which means you can never get a true, apples-to-apples comparison of how a more advanced AI could perform.

Lack of deep, actionable insights

The reports can show you what happened, but they do a terrible job of explaining why. For instance, the dashboard might show that resolution time was lower on tickets where AI was used. Great, right? But it can't tell you if that's because those tickets were super simple to begin with.

As users have pointed out in Zendesk's own community forums, the inability to filter by things like ticket channel or tags can completely throw off your data. Imagine your phone support tickets are naturally quicker to solve, and your team doesn't use the AI tools on calls. The dashboard might accidentally make it look like not using AI leads to faster resolutions, which is the exact opposite of what you're trying to prove.

On top of that, all the reporting is backward-looking. You only get to see how things went after the fact. There’s no feature that lets you simulate how a smarter AI would have handled thousands of your past tickets. You can't forecast your potential ROI or build a business case before you go live. You’re always stuck looking in the rearview mirror.

It ignores your most valuable knowledge

Let’s be honest, your company’s real knowledge isn't just sitting neatly in your Zendesk help center. It’s scattered everywhere: in past ticket resolutions, on Confluence pages, within Google Docs, buried in old Slack threads, and documented in Notion.

The Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard has zero visibility into this treasure trove of information. Because it can only track an AI that’s limited to Zendesk's own knowledge base, it can't tell you how well your AI is actually leveraging your entire company brain. You can't measure which knowledge sources are solving the most problems or, crucially, find the gaps in your documentation that are causing people to create tickets in the first place.

An infographic showing how different knowledge sources are scattered across a company, a limitation of the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard.

A better approach: Unifying AI and analytics for real insights

Instead of wrestling with a siloed dashboard that only shows you a small piece of the puzzle, a more modern approach is to use an AI platform where powerful analytics are just part of the package. Tools like eesel AI are designed to plug into your whole support ecosystem, giving you a much clearer and more useful view of what's going on.

See the full picture by unifying knowledge

The first step to getting analytics you can actually use is to give your AI access to all your knowledge. eesel AI connects to everything from your Zendesk help center and ticket history to external sources like Confluence, SharePoint, and Notion.

This means the analytics you get reflect how your AI performs using your team's complete, collective brain, not just a tiny, sanitized slice of it. The reports can show you exactly which documents are solving the most tickets and, even better, where the information gaps are that you need to fill.

Test with confidence using simulation

Guesswork shouldn't be part of your support strategy. Before you even think about letting an AI agent talk to live customers, eesel AI’s simulation mode runs it against thousands of your past tickets in a totally safe environment.

You get a detailed report that forecasts your potential automation rate, pinpoints the exact kinds of tickets the AI can handle, and even shows you potential cost savings. This data-first approach takes the anxiety out of launching a new tool and gives you a solid ROI projection from day one.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation results, which provides a detailed report on potential automation rates and cost savings, a key alternative to the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard.

Get actionable reports that drive improvement

The dashboard in eesel AI is built for action, not just for looking at charts. It doesn't waste your time with vanity metrics. Instead, it highlights trends and shows you the specific knowledge gaps that are costing you time and money.

You can see the exact questions your AI couldn't find answers for. This gives you a prioritized to-do list for what help center articles to write or what internal docs to create next. It creates a powerful feedback loop where your AI gets smarter every single week, something a basic, backward-looking dashboard just can't do.

A screenshot of the eesel AI dashboard showing actionable reports on knowledge gaps, contrasting with the limited insights from the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard.

Comparing pricing: Zendesk AI vs. alternatives

When you start to look at the costs, the difference in philosophy becomes even more obvious.

To get Zendesk's generative AI features and the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard, you have to buy their "Copilot" add-on. This is only available for their more expensive Suite Professional and Enterprise plans. So, the analytics are bundled into a pricey, top-tier subscription, and the total cost can get pretty high.

On the other hand, eesel AI has transparent pricing based on a predictable monthly interaction volume. There are no confusing per-resolution fees that punish you for successfully automating more tickets. Every plan, even the entry-level Team tier, comes with powerful analytics, the full simulation engine, and the ability to connect all your knowledge sources. You get a complete AI platform and top-notch reporting bundled together, often for a lot less than a high-tier Zendesk plan with all its add-ons.

A screenshot of eesel AI's transparent pricing page, an alternative to the bundled pricing required for the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard.

Move beyond the Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard to actionable insights

The Zendesk AI Explore Dashboard is a decent, if simple, tool for seeing how often your agents are clicking the buttons on Zendesk's built-in AI features. If that's all you need to know, it gets the job done.

But its isolated nature, lack of predictive tools, and surface-level data mean it can't give you the deep, actionable insights you need to truly level up your support operation. To measure and improve your whole support system, you need a platform that brings all your knowledge together and gives you analytics that show you not just what happened, but exactly what you should do next.

Ready to see what truly actionable AI analytics look like? Sign up for eesel AI for free and see how it can transform your Zendesk support.