Zendesk News Roundup for September 2025

Welcome to the September Zendesk News roundup. After a long summer break, I tuned out of most newsrooms and feeds, so catching up and writing this issue was a tough task. Somehow, I managed.

Before we dive in I want to highlight one article I published this summer. As CX moves toward deeper automation, companies need to decide which tickets can be fully automated and which deserve human attention from their agents.

In this article I give a step by step approach on how you can move your team towards more valuable conversations that build relationships with your customers, while making sure that the other conversations are still handled in a good way. Worth a read!

In Zendesk News I'm wondering what fall will bring. Zendesk already announced their online AI Summit in October. Last year's event brought us the new voice, omnichannel AI Agents and improved Agent Copilot so really wondering what we see this year. I assume we'll get updates on Zendesk's new Contact Center offering and (maybe?) the GA release of Agentic Procedures for AI Agents Advanced?

If you're interested in watching the broadcast yourself, you can register via this link. And I'll make sure to write up a full overview after the presentation airs!

Zendesk

GPT 5

Zendesk builds and maintains their own AI models for (among many) agentic procedures, intent and use case detection e.a.

But for anything generative they use OpenAI's GPT models, while keeping customer privacy and security in mind. Agent Copilot and AI Agents got an update to GPT4o earlier this year improving speed and quality of the responses generated.

OpenAI released their new GPT 5 model last month, replacing its existing GPT4 family of models. And Zendesk already adopted the model across their platform, seeing a 20 reduction in fallback flows, and a significant increase in reliability and speed.

You can read all about their findings in this newsroom article on their website.

Employee Services

Zendesk for Employee Services was announced at Relate and it seems they're actively marketing the product via their website and YouTube now that the approvals feature is generally available.

AI Agents & Messaging

Instructions for all AI Agents

Instructions allow you to tailor your AI agent’s generative responses. This capability, which was previously available only for the AI agents - Advanced add-on, can now be leveraged by all AI agent customers.

The new Agentic and generative capabilities of your AI Agents give them the liberty to create custom replies based on customers' inquiries and context. Instructions for AI Agents – not be confused with Agent Copilot instructions – allow you to control to your AI Agents.

But similar to your human team, freedom also means giving people and tools the ability to go off script. It needs instructions to know how it should react. What’s your tone of voice? How do you address customers? What do you always, or never, mention?

When setting up your AI Agent you probably won't really need these. But as your usage grows and you start gathering feedback via Zendesk QA and reporting, you'll gradually start adding these to nudge your AI Agents towards better answers and a tone of voice that fits your brand's personality.

Agent Workspace & Routing

Department spaces and Omnichannel Routing

Zendesk now integrates department spaces with omnichannel routing, removing complex setup needs and fixing issues like failed ticket assignments, resulting in faster response times and improved workflows for all users.

This update is automatically enabled for all customers that use department spaces and omnichannel routing. Omnichannel routing routes tickets to groups and assigns it to an available (capacity, online, skills) agent in that group.

Before this ̶f̶i̶x̶ update, tickets could be routed to agents in the right group but outside the correct brand. Now routing respects brand membership and only assigns tickets to agents in the right department space.

Agent Copilot

Quick Answers in Agent Workspace

Zendesk's marketing and story revolves around AI powered resolutions that span the platform. Agentic conversations with AI powered chatbots, agent assist with Copilot procedures, and insights via autoQA are the headliners of the platform and allow companies to automate their conversations.

A recurring "critique of mine" is that AI features, while ingrained in the platform, were mostly locked behind paid add-ons. Suite customers often saw little AI capability out of the box.

Over the last year this has changed. It started with the inclusion of AI Agent Essential with generative Help Center replies. Then we got the new Quick Answers for the Help Center enabled for free for all customers. And this month the same generative answers are enabled for all customers in Agent Workspace, giving agents access to those same capabilities to pull answers from your support articles.

I've written a full overview of the feature last year when it was still locked behind the Advanced AI add-on.

What's nice about this update is that Suite now basically gives customers a taste of Zendesk AI capabilities across Agents and Customer channels alike. On the customer side you have generative replies for email, help center search and conversations. And on the Agent side you get generative answers in the knowledge panel.

Customers that need more, like customizable procedures with logic, or API integrations can (and should) upgrade to the full AI Agent Advanced, or Agent Copilot. But if that step is too steep without any proof of ROI, these new included capabilities give you a taste, and hopefully, a measurable impact in your analytics.

Agent Instructions for auto-assist

Naming things is hard 😇.

The new Agent instructions for Agent Copilot, not to be confused with instructions for AI Agents are a new addition to auto-assist procedures. They're there to bridge the gap between manual steps and automation in your procedures. In scenarios where you can't use APIs or actions to execute steps, procedures can now show agents the steps they need to take themselves to move a ticket forward.

Macros for auto-assist

Agent Copilot auto-assist pulls answers from Help Center articles, recent comments and procedures. Within procedures we can now tell the procedure to run a macro as part of its process.

This allows you to combine existing macros and AI powered procedures. It also makes it easier to migrate from macros to procedures, with the benefit that all logic of a macro stays within the macro, and you can reuse that logic in multiple procedures that need to use it.

Intent Suggestions for Intelligent Triage

Use Cases for AI Agents and Intents for Agent Copilot are there to identify why a customer is contacting you. They allow you to identify an inquiry and reply with a procedure, route it to the right team, change priority or any other rule or automation you want to apply to it.

Similar to custom fields they categorize tickets and allow you to report on the types of questions customers have. With the added benefit that classification happens automatically, whereas traditional categorization is a manual step done by agents.

With categorization companies create a dropdown with a few dozen options, and agents manually select the matching category, or assign the ticket to other if nothing matches. This means that your other category is a treasure trove of hidden optimization. It's all the things customers ask you which you didn't account for. All inquiries that are ripe for automation and self service.

Since LLMs can read all your conversations and we can not only prompt models to categorize them based on predefined intents or use cases, we can also ask them to summarize unmatched inquiries and offer a list of potential use cases or intents for you to create and handle.

This is where the new Intent Suggestions (and Use Case suggestions) come in. On a weekly basis Zendesk will offer a list of intents you can create (and then resolve with procedures or other automation means).

Knowledge & Insights

Excluding terms from AI translation

Zendesk's Help Center and Knowledge management recently got a whole bunch of new AI powers ranging from Quick Answers in search, writing tools and the new AI powered translations.

One of the issues that might arise with the AI powered translations are terms and words that get translated that shouldn't. Brand and product names are an obvious example of this. Similarly you might want keep the nuance added by using terms in the original language which you never want translated. Think about pro-bono, schadenfreude or deja-vu.

The new Excluded terms option for AI translations solves this by allowing you to add a list of words that should never get translated by the system.

Weirdly this feature was part of the AI section in Admin Center. I originally looked for it in the Admin section of the Help Center..

Platform & Security

File type allowlist

You can now choose if you want customers to send you any kind of attachment, or only a predefined list of file types.

External oAuth overview

Zendesk has been reworking the Security and API section of the Help Center in the last few months. They've added new pages to manage API tokens, provided a new Log page and moved SunCo api pages into this same section.

New this month is the addition of an External oAuth page that lists all apps and platforms that have active oAuth tokens running for your instance. It's a similar approach to SweetHawks' API Integrations app but somehow lists less integration than Sweethawk's' app does?

One of the reasons for Zendesk to add this page is a new requirement for Marketplace apps to use oAuth instead of user API Tokens in apps, and this page gives customers a better view on what app has access.

Enhancements to the email setup

Users adding a new support email address using either the Exchange Connector or Gmail Connector can import the last 300 emails in their account's inbox.

I really like these new connectors. It makes adding an email channel to Zendesk as easy as adding social channels like WhatsApp or Instagram and keeps control of email security and behavior solely on the side of your IT team, removing discussions about adding SPF and other DNS records.

When adding a new external email support address, the “Connect other” option is no longer available. The “Connect external address” option now incorporates both workflows in a single selection.

Additionally, they remove one of the options when adding email addresses via the traditional forwarding method, simplifying the dropdown to just two options, Zendesk or External

Banning users in Messaging

Admins can now ban IP addresses in messaging to block all users coming from specific IP addresses, making it especially effective against bad actors who evade bans by creating multiple accounts.

Nice upgrade that allows for bulk banning of IP addresses. Combined with the more gradual user suspension, this makes it easy for Admins and Team Leads to block spam from the Messaging channel.

If only they'd offer the same capability to their API channel, we might finally have a solution for that annoying Chinese qun and qq.com spam!

Major Changes

Two step verification rollout

Between October 27, 2025 and November 5, 2025, all remaining eligible customers who were not included in the phase 1 or phase 2 rollouts, and have Zendesk authentication turned on, will be enrolled in 2SV.

In short this means that any customer that uses Zendesk logins (and not their own SSO) will need to confirm login by clicking a link in an email whenever they login to a new device the first time.

Deprecation of SunCo API wrappers

We’re announcing the deprecation of the auto-generated Python, Ruby, Java, and JavaScript client libraries ("wrappers") for the Sunshine Conversations API.

If you're using one of Zendesk's prebuilt wrappers for their Sunshine Conversation APIs: Zendesk announced they gave them one final update to fix bugs. However moving forward these will no longer be maintained.

More info

Perspectives

Zendesk Contact Center

As Jonathan Barouch, Vice President of GM Contact Center at Zendesk, explains:
“The first generation of contact centers were on-prem, the second generation was cloud, and I think the current generation are the ones that were born for the AI era.  (...) What’s interesting is we’re actually seeing some of the on-prem businesses go straight to AI for their contact centers, essentially bypassing the traditional cloud vendors altogether.”

He likened the current contact center trend to the mobile revolution:

“You’ve got large parts of the developing world that never had a desktop PC; they went straight to mobile. (...) I think it’s the same with on-prem contact centers. Customers are missing that middle step and going straight to the end state.”

Deltastring News Roundup

Nico Boyce from Zendesk Partner Deltastring relaunched his excellent Zendesk news aggregator this week. It's a great source to stay up to date on all things Zendesk and CX.

Zendesk news, from Deltastring | Deltastring: Zendesk migrations, automations, integrations, applications

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