A practical guide to Zendesk AI for Help Center Content

Zendesk is a huge name in customer support, so of course, they're jumping into AI. A big focus for them is using Zendesk AI for Help Center Content, a bunch of tools meant to make self-service smarter and your agents' lives easier. On paper, it sounds like a great way to automate support and get customers answers fast.

But what's it actually like to use? And what are the catches? This guide will break down what Zendesk's native AI really offers for your help center. We’ll look at the features, talk about the limitations that often go unmentioned, and show you a way to build an AI that can actually tap into your company's full brain.

What is Zendesk AI for Help Center Content?

So, what exactly is "Zendesk AI for Help Center Content"? It’s not one specific thing you add to your cart. It’s more like a family of AI features baked right into the Zendesk platform, all designed to make your knowledge base content work harder.

The goal is to make your help center the central brain for all your automated support. The main pieces of this are:

• AI Agents & Bots: These are your frontline responders, designed to pull answers directly from your help center articles to answer questions in a chat.

• Generative AI tools: These are little helpers for your team, making it faster to write and polish articles.

• AI-powered search: This feature tries to give customers the right answer immediately, so they don't have to wade through a sea of articles.

The core idea makes sense: your well-kept help center should be the fuel for your AI. It’s a solid starting point, but as you’ll see, it runs into some major issues when your company knowledge doesn't live in one tidy place.

Key features of Zendesk AI for Help Center Content

To give credit where it's due, Zendesk has built some pretty handy tools here. They're designed to help both the people writing the articles and the customers trying to find answers.

Generative search and article summaries

One of the biggest recent updates is generative search. Instead of just spitting out a list of links, Zendesk can now generate a direct "Quick Answer" at the top of the search results. The idea is to give users an immediate solution so they can get on with their day without clicking through three different articles.

Zendesk also rolled out "Article Summaries." If a customer lands on a super long, technical article, a short summary at the top gives them the main points before they dive in. It's a nice touch for making the experience a bit smoother and getting people answers more quickly.

AI-powered content creation tools

Right inside the article editor, Zendesk has added a few generative AI tools to give content writers a hand. These features, which are usually part of the Copilot add-on, are all about speeding things up:

• Expand: You can scribble down a few bullet points, and the AI will turn it into a full paragraph. It’s pretty useful for banging out a first draft when you’re staring at a blank page.

• Simplify: Got an article full of technical terms? This tool can rewrite it in plain English, which is great for making your content easier for everyone to understand.

• Tone Shift: This lets you tweak the writing style with a click, shifting it from formal to friendly or vice versa. It helps keep your brand voice consistent without needing to rewrite everything by hand.

They've also included an AI translation feature, which helps teams offer their help center content in multiple languages without needing a huge translation budget.

Content gap identification

Zendesk AI also tries to help you find the holes in your knowledge base. Its "content cues" feature looks at incoming support tickets to spot common questions that don't have a corresponding help article. It’s a smart way to keep your content fresh, but its usefulness is totally dependent on the data it can access, which, as we’re about to see, is a big catch.

The hidden costs and limitations of Zendesk's native AI

While Zendesk's tools look great in a demo, once you start using them day-to-day, some serious cracks can start to show. These are the kinds of issues that pop up a few months down the line, long after the initial buzz has worn off.

Your knowledge doesn't just live in the help center

This is, by far, the biggest issue. Zendesk's AI is almost entirely limited to the content you've published in your official Zendesk Help Center. But let's be honest, where does your company's actual knowledge live? If you’re like most businesses, it’s all over the place.

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Like many companies, their most important information is scattered across:

• Internal wikis in Confluence or Notion

• Technical guides and project plans in Google Docs

• Quick answers and troubleshooting tips shared in Slack or Microsoft Teams

• And the most valuable resource of all: the thousands of past ticket conversations where your agents have already figured out the solution.

When your AI can't access these sources, it has a massive blind spot. It can only give answers based on a tiny slice of your company's collective knowledge. This leads to weak responses, frustrated customers, and agents who are still forced to search for answers manually across different apps.

This infographic shows how a unified AI can pull information from scattered sources like Slack, Notion, and Google Docs, which is a key limitation of relying only on Zendesk AI for Help Center Content.

Rigid intent models and complex setup

Zendesk’s intelligent triage system, which tries to figure out a customer's intent, sentiment, and language, is pre-trained on data from a handful of industries. If your business doesn't fit perfectly into one of those molds or if you use specific industry lingo, the AI might completely miss the point of what your customers are asking. As one user bluntly stated, "the intent model is not build for all businesses."

Getting these systems to work well often takes a ton of setup and constant tweaking. If the out-of-the-box model isn't right for you, you can end up with a tool that just doesn't deliver. You really need an AI that learns from your data and fits your way of working, not the other way around.

Complicated and unpredictable pricing

Zendesk's advanced AI features aren't usually part of the standard packages. They're sold as pricey add-ons like "Copilot" or "Advanced AI," often running around $50 per agent, per month. That cost adds up incredibly fast as your team gets bigger.

Even trickier, some plans come with usage-based fees for things like "automated resolutions." This means your bill could jump up and down each month, making it a nightmare to budget for.

How to supercharge your Zendesk AI with a unified knowledge base

So if your knowledge is scattered everywhere and Zendesk's AI can only see the help center, what do you do? Instead of trying to cram everything into Zendesk, you can use an AI that connects to your tools where they already are. That's the idea behind something like eesel AI. It's built to fix the silo problem by bringing all your knowledge together.

Here’s how that works:

• Connect all your sources in a click: eesel AI integrates with not just your Zendesk help center but also Google Docs, Confluence, Notion, and over 100 other apps. This gives your AI a complete view of your company's knowledge, getting rid of the blind spots that hold native tools back.

A screenshot showing the wide range of applications eesel AI can connect to, illustrating how to overcome the limitations of Zendesk AI for Help Center Content.

• Train it on what really matters: your past tickets: This is huge. eesel AI learns directly from your old ticket conversations. It picks up on your brand's voice, understands the real-world context of customer issues, and learns the exact solutions your best agents have already provided, solutions that were probably never turned into a formal help article.

• Test it out before it ever talks to a customer: One of the scariest parts of AI is launching it and hoping it doesn't say something weird. The simulation mode in eesel AI lets you test your AI on thousands of your past tickets in a safe space. You can see exactly how it would have answered, get a solid prediction of your resolution rate, and figure out your potential ROI before it goes live.

This screenshot shows the eesel AI simulation mode, allowing users to test the AI's performance on past tickets before deployment.

• Get up and running in minutes: You don't need to sit through long sales calls or mandatory demos. With eesel AI, you can sign up, connect your apps, and set up your first AI agent all on your own. You can start with something small, like automating one simple ticket type, and then expand as you get more comfortable.

Pricing comparison: Zendesk AI vs. eesel AI

The way you pay for these tools is also completely different. Zendesk's model can feel like it punishes you for growing, while eesel AI’s pricing scales with how much you actually use it, which is a lot more straightforward and fair.

Final thoughts

Look, the native tools in Zendesk AI for Help Center Content are a decent starting point. They can definitely help you write articles and improve your search. But they’re stuck inside the Zendesk box. The reality is that your company's real expertise is spread across a dozen different apps, and an AI that can't see all of that is working with one hand tied behind its back.

If you want to build an AI that can actually solve customer problems, you need to connect all of those dots. A tool like eesel AI doesn't replace Zendesk; it enhances it by giving it access to a complete picture of your company's knowledge.

Ready to see what your company’s collective brain can really do? Give eesel AI a try for free and see how much you can automate in just a few minutes.