Zendesk today introduced Specialized AI Agents, purpose-built for work that matters most to specific business or industry. They combine industry expertise with each company's unique knowledge, workflows and connected systems to take action and automate up to 80% of workflows.
New Industry and Custom Agents understand your business, and take action across systems you use to move your business forward.
"The era of generic, one-size-fits-all AI agents is over. The best agents are specialists: deeply grounded in the work, the industry, and the business they serve," said Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering and AI, Zendesk. "Specialized Agents give organizations expertise and context to take on more complex work, earn trust, and drive quantitative impact."
Specialized Agents are key step toward Zendesk's Autonomous Service Workforce, first introduced at Relate 2026. Vision is simple: AI takes on more of work while businesses remain in control of how that work gets done.
Industry Expertise Out of the Box: Industry Agents are built for work businesses within specific industry have in common. Zendesk is launching with commerce, where AI agents can help customers shop, manage orders, process returns and exchanges, resolve delivery issues, and handle refunds. Over time, Zendesk will expand Industry Agents to additional industries, including financial services, media, and technology.
Industry Agents combine Zendesk AI with systems, policies, and expertise required to complete high-value workflows from start to finish. In commerce, that means connecting to systems such as Shopify, Narvar, Stripe, and Riskified to understand customer's request, retrieve right information, and take action without requiring customers or service teams to move between multiple systems.
Zendesk is also working with Riskified to bring industry-leading risk intelligence directly into commerce workflows, helping retailers make smarter decisions about returns, refunds, and exchanges while reducing fraud and policy abuse.
Custom Agents for Work Only Your Business Knows: Not every workflow can come out of the box. Every business has its own policies, approvals and ways of operating. Using Agent Builder — Zendesk's no-code environment for creating, testing and deploying agents — businesses can now build Custom Agents attuned to how their business is run. Customers have already run more than 1 million Custom Agent executions within seven weeks of launch.
"We want to resolve issues from beginning to end so consumers can get back to using their machines every day," says Leora Machlis, Director of Global Customer Care at SodaStream. "Customizing our integrations helps us act quickly as customer needs change."
One Workforce. Any Service Platform: Industry and Custom Agents can run in Zendesk or in service environments including Salesforce and ServiceNow, giving businesses specialized AI without requiring them to replace systems they already use.
About Zendesk
Zendesk orchestrates every service experience wherever work happens by powering autonomous service workforce of AI agents, automation, and human expertise so every moment feels continuous, personal, and focused on real resolution. Zendesk Resolution Platform unifies workforce into single system that improves with every interaction.
