Zendesk unveiled a suite of new AI-powered tools at its AI summit on Wednesday, marking a major shift in how customer support is delivered. At the core of the announcement is an autonomous AI agent designed to resolve 80% of support issues without any human involvement. The system will be supported by a co-pilot agent to assist human agents with the remaining 20% of complex cases, as well as additional specialized agents for administration, voice interactions, and analytics. Shashi Upadhyay, Zendesk’s President of Product, Engineering, and AI, described the move as part of a broader transformation in the support industry. “The world’s going to shift from software that’s built for human users, to a system where AI actually does most of the work,” he told TechCrunch. The capabilities of modern large language models are increasingly capable of handling complex, real-world tasks. Benchmarking platform TAU-bench, which evaluates a model’s ability to use tools and perform multi-step actions, includes a scenario involving processing a returned product—a task closely mirroring common support workflows. The top-performing model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, successfully resolved 85% of these test cases. Zendesk’s pivot to AI has been years in the making. Following a turbulent period in 2022, including an investor battle, the company made a series of strategic acquisitions to build its AI foundation. The new analytics agent, launched today, is built on the Hyperarc acquisition completed in July. Earlier purchases include Klaus, a QA and agentic AI system acquired in February 2024, and Ultimate, an automation platform acquired in March. Zendesk has already tested the new system with select customers, and early results are promising. “For customers that have been using it, consumer satisfaction has been up by five to ten points,” Upadhyay said. While many companies have experimented with AI chatbots for customer service—Airbnb, Regal Theaters, and others have deployed in-house solutions—the new Zendesk system represents a leap in scale and autonomy. Unlike earlier systems that primarily retrieved information, Zendesk’s AI agents can take self-directed actions, such as updating tickets, initiating refunds, or escalating issues. If successful, the shift could have far-reaching economic consequences. Zendesk’s Resolution Platform currently supports nearly 20,000 customers and handles 4.6 billion support tickets annually. Globally, the customer service industry employs millions—2.4 million in the U.S. alone—with much larger workforces in countries like India, the Philippines, and Mexico. The widespread adoption of AI agents could significantly reduce the need for human agents in routine support roles, reshaping the future of work in the sector.