Zendesk launches specialised AI agents for commerce

Zendesk has introduced specialised AI Agents for industry-specific customer service work, starting with tools for commerce businesses.

The new offering includes Industry Agents for common sector tasks and Custom Agents that companies can build around their own internal processes. The agents are designed to help businesses automate up to 80% of workflows by combining sector knowledge with company data, workflows and connected systems.

Commerce focus

The first Industry Agents are aimed at commerce businesses. They can help customers shop, manage orders, process returns and exchanges, resolve delivery issues and handle refunds.

These agents connect with systems including Shopify, Narvar, Stripe and Riskified, allowing them to retrieve information and take action across multiple services. The approach is intended to reduce the need for customers and service teams to move between platforms to complete a task.

Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering and AI at Zendesk, described the launch as a shift away from broad AI tools toward narrower systems tied to specific work.

"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 Upadhyay.

"Specialised Agents give organisations the expertise and context to take on more complex work, earn trust, and drive quantitative impact," he said.

Zendesk plans to extend its Industry Agents beyond commerce into financial services, media and technology. That would broaden the product beyond retail and order-related service issues into other sectors with their own recurring workflows and compliance requirements.

Australian market

Zendesk linked the launch to customer service pressure in Australia, where businesses are dealing with tighter household budgets and shifting buying patterns. It cited its own data showing that 90% of Australian customer experience leaders say customers will abandon brands that fail to resolve issues on first contact.

"For Australian businesses, cost of living pressures and changing consumer behaviour are raising the stakes of every customer interaction. In fact, 90% of Australian CX leaders say customers will drop brands that cannot resolve issues on first contact. The introduction of Industry Agents for commerce helps meet that expectation by combining industry expertise, customer context, and connected workflows to resolve common service moments quickly and personally - protecting loyalty while delivering better service at scale," said Kellie Hackney, Vice President of Zendesk Australia and New Zealand.

The positioning reflects broader competition among software providers to show that AI tools can do more than answer simple questions. The commercial argument increasingly rests on whether these systems can complete end-to-end service tasks with fewer hand-offs to human staff.

Custom build

Alongside the sector products, Zendesk has opened Agent Builder, a no-code environment that lets businesses create Custom Agents around their own rules, approvals and ways of working. Companies can define what job an agent handles, which systems it can access, what actions it can take and when human approval is needed.

Customers have already run more than 1 million Custom Agent executions within seven weeks of launch, according to Zendesk. It also said some users have seen automated resolution rates rise by 10% after deployment.

Zendesk said the Custom Agents can also act proactively, either in response to business events or on a schedule. That would extend automation beyond customer-initiated support requests into routine internal tasks and follow-up actions.

Two customer examples highlighted the appeal of tailoring AI systems to narrow service problems. One came from appliance support, where the emphasis is on completing a case rather than passing customers through several steps.

"We want to resolve issues from beginning to end so consumers can get back to using their machines every day," said Leora Machlis, Director of Global Customer Care at SodaStream.

"Customising our integrations helps us act quickly as customer needs change," she said.

A second example came from Tonies, which pointed to the urgency that often surrounds consumer product issues involving children.

"When a Toniebox isn't working, it's not just a technical issue-it's a toddler waiting," said Lauren Cooper, Director of Global Customer Happiness at Tonies.

"Parents want answers now, not another hold or a long conversation," she said.

Partner role

Zendesk is also working with Riskified to bring risk intelligence into commerce workflows, particularly around returns, refunds and exchanges. The aim is to help retailers make decisions while limiting fraud and policy abuse.

The partnership adds another layer to the product strategy, which depends on connecting customer service software with payment, logistics and fraud systems rather than keeping support work inside one application.

"Zendesk Industry Agents are the AI-first platform redefining retail service at scale," said Jeff Otto, Chief Marketing Officer at Riskified.

"We're excited to embed our specialist AI agents and Identity Risk Intelligence so that every agent, AI or human, confidently knows who they're actually engaging with, creating delightful experiences for good customers while protecting retailers from fraud and abuse losses," he said.

Zendesk said its Industry and Custom Agents can run not only in Zendesk but also in service environments including Salesforce and ServiceNow, allowing businesses to use the tools without replacing their existing systems.