A practical guide to finding Zendesk's top AI agents in 2025

Zendesk is going all-in on AI. You’ve probably seen the splashy announcements and new features. But if you’re a support leader in the trenches, you might feel a disconnect between the marketing hype and your team’s day-to-day reality.

For many, the native AI tools feel a bit clunky, like an afterthought bolted onto a platform you otherwise love.

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Sound familiar? Maybe your AI is struggling because your knowledge base isn't perfectly curated, or you’re getting sticker shock from the unpredictable costs. If you're nodding along, you’re in the right place.

This guide is a straightforward look at what makes an AI agent actually work for a Zendesk team. We'll break down the native options, get real about their limitations, and compare them with more powerful, integrated alternatives that can genuinely make your life easier.

What are Zendesk top AI agents?

When we talk about AI agents for customer support, we're not talking about the simple, scripted chatbots from a few years back. Today’s AI agents are built to understand, reason, and take action on support tickets. They can summarize tricky issues, handle requests with multiple steps, and figure out when it's time to loop in a human.

For anyone using Zendesk, you have two main paths to bring this kind of AI into your workflow:

1. Native Zendesk AI: These are the tools built and sold directly by Zendesk, like their AI Agents and Copilot features. They live inside your Zendesk instance and are designed to work right away.

2. Third-Party Integrations: These are specialized AI platforms from other companies that plug directly into Zendesk. They're often built to beef up Zendesk's capabilities and get around the common frustrations of the native tools.

Which path you choose isn't just a small technical decision. It directly impacts your team’s workflow, your budget, and the quality of support you can offer.

Evaluating Zendesk's native AI agents

To figure out your options, it helps to start with what Zendesk offers out of the box. This gives us a baseline and helps explain why so many teams end up looking for alternatives.

What Zendesk offers

Zendesk’s AI setup is mostly split into two products:

• AI Agents: This is their tool for automating responses and workflows. The idea is to deflect common questions and resolve tickets without a person getting involved.

• Copilot: This is meant to be an assistant for your human agents. It helps with things like summarizing long ticket threads, changing the tone of a reply, and pulling answers from your knowledge base.

On paper, these tools sound pretty good. They come with features like sentiment analysis and are pre-trained on industry-specific data to give them a head start.

Real-world headaches: Why native tools fall short

Despite the promising feature list, many users hit the same roadblocks. The feedback is pretty consistent: the tools are decent, but they come with some serious strings attached.

The experience feels clunky. The AI features often feel disconnected from an agent's natural workflow. Instead of being smoothly integrated, agents have to open a separate "Intelligence" side panel or mess with a clunky flow builder to get things done. This just adds clicks and friction, which is the last thing anyone wants in a busy support environment.

It leans too heavily on a perfect knowledge base. This is probably the biggest complaint. Zendesk's AI needs a pristine, perfectly organized Zendesk help center to work well. If the answer isn't in a neat and tidy article, the AI usually gets stuck. It tends to ignore the goldmine of knowledge sitting in thousands of your past ticket resolutions or scattered across internal docs.

There's a lack of control and safety. Rolling out a new automation can be a bit nerve-wracking. Unfortunately, Zendesk doesn't give you many ways to safely test how its AI will behave before you let it loose on your customers. The automation flows can feel rigid and hard to tweak, making it tough to start small and scale up with confidence.

The cost of native AI

Zendesk’s pricing for its AI features can catch teams by surprise. The Advanced AI add-on, which includes the useful Copilot features, costs $50 per agent, per month.

But here's where it gets tricky for your budget: this isn't a license you can pick and choose for certain users. It's an all-or-nothing cost applied to every single one of your agents, whether they use the AI features heavily or not at all. For a team of 50 agents, that’s an extra $30,000 a year for a tool that might only be essential for a handful of people. It's a model that can lead to a lot of wasted spend.

Why third-party options are often the best choice

The limitations of native tools have paved the way for a new type of AI platform, one designed to integrate deeply with Zendesk and solve these exact problems.

Key advantages of integrated alternatives

The best third-party tools are built from the ground up to solve the core issues with native AI. Here's where they really pull ahead:

• They learn from all your knowledge. This is huge. The top third-party AI agents aren't stuck in your Zendesk help center. They can connect to and learn from all the places your team's knowledge actually lives. This means training on years of past tickets to nail your brand voice and common solutions, and integrating with tools like Confluence and Google Docs.

• They fit right into your workflow. Good tools are designed to feel like a natural part of Zendesk, not an awkward add-on. They pop up with suggestions and take action right where your agents are already working, causing minimal disruption.

• You get way more control and testing. Confidence is everything when you're automating support. Top-tier tools offer a "simulation mode" that lets you test your AI's performance on thousands of historical tickets before it ever talks to a customer. This takes the guesswork out of the equation and lowers the risk of a bad customer experience.

That's the problem tools like eesel AI are built to solve. Instead of being limited to a help center, it instantly learns from your team's entire ticket history and messy internal docs. This makes sure the AI gives answers based on real, proven solutions, not just static articles.

How to choose the right AI agent for your setup

Okay, so you're open to looking beyond Zendesk's native tools. How do you pick the right one for your team? It really comes down to a few key questions that separate the great AI agents from the just-okay ones.

How fast can you get running?

Your team is busy. You don't have months to sink into a complicated setup project. The best AI agents are truly self-serve. You should be able to sign up, connect your help desk, and start seeing results in minutes, not quarters.

While a lot of older systems require multiple sales calls and a long, consultant-led onboarding, modern platforms like eesel AI let you connect your Zendesk account and start simulating your AI agent in under five minutes, no sales call needed.

Where do the AI agents get their knowledge?

An AI agent is only as smart as the data it learns from. The "brain" of the AI is the most important part. Does it only read from a single, static knowledge base, or can it learn from the real-world conversations your team has every single day?

The best tools, including eesel AI, can train instantly on your historical tickets. This means its tone and answers are tailored to your business from day one, reflecting the work of your best agents and providing solutions that you already know work for your customers.

Can you test the AI agents safely?

You wouldn't let a new agent handle tickets without training and observation, and your AI should be no different. A risk-free testing environment is a must-have. A simulation mode doesn't just prevent bad customer experiences; it gives you solid, data-backed forecasts on how much you can automate and save.

A standout feature in top-tier tools like eesel AI is the powerful simulation mode. You can test your AI on thousands of past tickets to see exactly how it would have performed. It gives you the confidence to automate safely and at your own pace. The process is simple:

1. A ticket is pulled into the simulation environment.

2. eesel AI generates a reply and suggests actions based on what it's learned.

3. You get to review the AI's performance across thousands of tickets to see its accuracy and resolution rate.

4. If you like what you see, you can turn the AI on for live tickets. If not, you can easily tweak the prompts and knowledge sources and run the simulation again.

Is the pricing clear and predictable?

Finally, let's talk money. The best AI solutions offer pricing that is transparent, predictable, and doesn't punish you for having a busy month. Complicated per-resolution fees or expensive, mandatory per-seat licenses can quickly turn a cost-saving tool into a budget-breaker.

Look for providers like eesel AI that offer simple, flat-rate pricing based on usage. This helps you avoid the unpredictable costs that can make budgeting a nightmare.

Here’s a quick comparison of the two approaches:

Look beyond the default to find the best AI agents for Zendesk

While Zendesk's native AI is right there and ready to use, it often comes with real limitations in flexibility, intelligence, and cost. For teams that are serious about using AI to improve their support, the answer usually lies outside the default toolkit.

The truly top AI agents for Zendesk are often specialized third-party tools that bring together knowledge from all your sources, give you robust control through simulation, and have a pricing model that actually makes sense. The right AI tool should feel like an upgrade to your team's skills, not another complicated system to manage.

This video introduces Zendesk's next generation of AI agents, which are designed to resolve complex service requests without scripts or training.

Ready to see how a truly integrated AI agent can transform your Zendesk support? Try eesel AI for free. Connect your help desk in minutes and simulate its performance on your real ticket history today.