Welcome to the Zendesk news roundup for March. Only two months into the year, and Zendesk already dropped a few major news items. First off is the rollout of the new AI Agent line-up. Next we've got the rebranding of not only Agent Copilot, but also most of the existing product elements in suite.

And just before I wrapped up this newsletter, Zendesk announced they are going to acquire Local Measure. They're an AI -powered contact center platform that tightly integrated with Amazon AWS (and its voice capabilities) and focuses on automating tasks, make routing to the right team more effective, assists with translations and data-entry and ticket deflections across channels.

When reading Zendesk's press release though it seems they'll be acquiring Local Measure primarily for its Voice capabilities, and less for its copilot/AI agent assist capabilities:

“Voice is one of the most personal and powerful ways businesses connect with their customers and employees, and managing it at scale requires a solution that is both intelligent and adaptable,” said Tom Eggemeier, CEO of Zendesk. “By acquiring Local Measure, we are fast-tracking our ability to deliver a fully integrated, AI-powered voice solution that combines the strength of Zendesk’s platform with the flexibility, security, and scalability of Amazon Connect. This move positions Zendesk to lead in the next generation of AI-powered service.”

Reading between the lines – or maybe stating the obvious – I think this acquisition will be for Zendesk Voice what Ultimate did for the Zendesk Bot. Replace and improve what's there. Looking forward to exploring more of what this means in future articles, and if you work at Zendesk and can speak on the record to give more insights: do reach out!

My thanks to Knots for sponsoring my Relate 2025 coverage!

Speaking of announcements: It's March, which means Zendesk Relate is right around the corner! I'll be in Las Vegas at the event Tuesday to Friday with a calendar full of sessions related to AI Agents, Copilot, Employee Experience and much much more. Last years' event was great and I ended up writing half a dozen articles about the announcements and general vibe of the conference, so expect the same this year!

I'm especially curious about the Employee Service Suite that offers a new Suite offering catered to internal use cases for IT, HR or Facilities. And naturally, any improvement for Zendesk AI is high on the list. Especially hoping for API access to features like summaries, but one can hope..

If you're going to Relate too and want to meet up, send me a message!

🤖 AI Agents and Messaging

The biggest change this month has to be the gradual rollout of the new AI Agents Essentials and Advanced, refreshing the Zendesk AI Agent lineup in a new and more simplified line-up.

Customers who start using Zendesk now won’t see the legacy bot anymore, and only have access to the new and improved generative AI features within Zendesk AI Agent Essentials.

Existing customers will get this improvement AI capability by end of March, and will retain the existing Flow Builder and Answers functionality in their instance. That feature will stay working, but won’t receive any updates or new features anymore. They will one feature though. The AI Agent will only return generative responses and no longer supports listing a carousel of articles.

Any customer can upgrade to the new AI Agents Advanced giving them access to use cases and custom replies, API Integrations, deeper reporting insights and better email automation.

It's now possible to add a native privacy disclaimer at the top of the Web Widget and Mobile SDK. You can add your notice via Admin Center > Messaging > Channel > Settings.

Unity SDK adds support for Help Center views

Now this is an update I hope arrives for all Zendesk SDKs, both web and mobile. With the arrival of the Messaging Web Widget we lost the ability to browse the Help Center and submit forms. While the latter arguably is not that big of a loss since an AI Agent is a better way to request information and interact with customers, sometimes just browsing and reading documentation does help customers better than getting a short reply. Especially for documentation or long form tutorials.

The Unity SDK now offers an inline Help Center browser and I really – really – want this for the web widget too!

Updates to the native Facebook integration

The Facebook Pages channel gets a nice quality of life improvement in the way it handles threaded replies to posts:

Previously, all comments on a Facebook post were added to a single Zendesk ticket, making it challenging to track separate conversations.

With this update Top-level comments on a public Facebook post will continue to be consolidated into a single ticket and Threaded replies (responses to a top-level comment) will now generate separate child tickets, ensuring better clarity and workflow management.

👨🏻‍💻 Agent Workspace and Copilot

Not only the AI Agents got a new name. Zendesk is also rebranding their Advanced AI Add-on to a more simple Zendesk Copilot branding. So we now have Zendesk AI Agents to deflect and offer self service to customers, and Zendesk Copilot to assist agents, followed by Zendesk QA to get deeper insights.

This, combined with the new naming for Help Center, Sales, Reporting (and somehow, still Support) makes the overall line-up of products a lot easier to grasp. Although I doo miss the quirkiness and unique naming of Guide or Explore. It’s a shame everyone follows Apple’s naming these days with Apple TV, Apple Notes, Apple Music instead of fun names like Slack, Asana, Ghost or even.. iTunes.

Advanced AI add-on features now turned on by default for new customers

Speaking of Advanced AI, any new customer who buys the Zendesk Copilot add-on will get the features automatically enabled instead of them being toggled off in Admin Center.

This might lead to scenarios where you can’t really control when your agents start seeing your new AI capabilities popup, but I’ve heard stories about customers buying the add-on, never bothering to turn it on and then ask where the promised efficiency gains where, so yeah, enabling it seems the logical thing to do.

So once you purchase the Copilot add-on the following features will be enabled by default now: Intelligent triage detection of intent, language, and sentiment,, similar tickets, merging suggestions and quick answers in Agent Workspace as well as the writing tools. Auto-assist and suggested replies do stay disabled by default.

Enhancements to similar tickets

Zendesk updated the logic behind similar tickets with a few new improvements. Similar tickets, for those unfamiliar, is the feature where the search dropdown in Agent Workspace offers tickets related to the ticket the agent is currently looking at.

Aside from requester and content, Similar Tickets will now also surface tickets with a similar Intent or Entity linked to it. Similar tickets will also prioritize newer ticket over older ones, ensuring recommendations remain timely and relevant.

Deactivating intents

You can now deactivate intents directly from the list in Admin Center > Intelligent Triage, ensuring unwanted intents are no longer detected on tickets and make the dropdown for agents a bit more manageable.

🧱 Open and Flexible Platform

Improvements to Dynamic Content search

We've added the ability to search dynamic content by title and placeholder in the Dynamic Content page in Admin Center. This capability allows admins to find the right piece of dynamic content more quickly. Previously, admins could only search for dynamic content by the content in variants.

General availability of auto-reply and internal note actions in ticket triggers

I’ve written a few articles where I mention the option to add an Internal Note via triggers to a ticket. Each time I got feedback from readers asking me where that feature was. Turns out, adding comments or internal notes to tickets was only available to customers who had the ̶A̶d̶v̶a̶n̶c̶e̶d̶ ̶A̶I̶ Zendesk Copilot add-on (in order to be able to send out automatic replies based on intents.

This capability is now finally available to all customers. So if you used Webhooks to trigger comments, you can now replace those with native trigger actions!

Two-factor authentication requirements for End-users

You can now require the use of 2FA for not only agents, but also end-users. Users can then store their 2FA codes in Google Authenticator, Apple Passwords or whatever app they use to store their codes.

Redaction Suggestion supports additional entities

Redaction suggestions are part of the new Advanced Data Protection and Privacy- add on (Can we rename this one tool Zendesk 😇) and highlight specific pieces of PII in conversations and tickets.

They used to be limited to names, email addresses e.a., and are now expanded to support Date of birth,US Driver’s license, IP address, Phone number in an extended range of languages (Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, French)

Email delivery failure alerts

For a while now the /identities endpoint in Zendesk had a delivery_state and undeliverable_count value in its payload. However, even though implemented it seemed these values never got updated.

This month this feature seemingly got deprecated entirely and got replaced with a new native feature in Agent Workspace that clearly notifies your agents of any undeliverable email, and included tags on the ticket for reporting purposes.

⚠ Major Changes.

Ticket Forms API

Starting March 17, 2025, Zendesk is releasing a change that will result in Admin Center no longer returning deleted ticket forms. Calls to the Show Ticket Form API endpoint will also no longer return deleted ticket forms.

No more password authentication

As previously announced, Zendesk will stop accepting email and password as an authentication method for API requests on December 31, 2025, for all customers. If you are actively using this method today, you must switch to using API tokens or OAuth before December 31, 2025 to avoid any impact due to this removal.

The simplest alternative is using an API token. You just need to update your request to use the following format: `{email_address}/token:{api_token}`

💡Insights

Why is everything a chat interface?

Natural language is great for starting something new—it’s faster than clicking around, but it's not always the best tool for the job. Natural language is becoming the lazy user interface. It gives the illusion that a problem is solved. Just because you can interact with an AI via text doesn't mean it's the best way to get things done.