At its flagship global conference, Relate, Zendesk unveiled Zendesk AI, an intelligence layer that makes personalised, efficient and empathetic customer experiences (CX) more accessible.

The new offering combines Zendesk’s data and insights with new AI technologies, including the company’s proprietary models, as well as large language models (LLMs).

Zendesk AI helps companies instantly improve service experiences, save time, better understand their customers, and create seamless interactions. The solution continues to learn over time, is fast to deploy, easy to use, and immediately adds value without teams of developers or months of implementation time.

“More than 90% of our customers already use AI within Zendesk, and we are building on this great foundation with new solutions that any business can use immediately. AI has significant benefits for agents, admins and businesses that want to deliver the best customer experience, and Zendesk AI will help them instantly see tangible value in cost savings and thousands of hours a month in gained productivity,” Zendesk CEO, Tom Eggemeier said.

New capabilities of Zendesk AI include advanced bots for messaging and email that automatically solve issues and leverage the most extensive database of customer intents for more personalised and accurate responses; agent assistance with AI-powered insights and suggestions to quickly solve customer issues and respond faster, with proper context; and intelligent triage which uses intent detection, language detection, and sentiment analysis to create intelligent workflows that get smarter over time.

Zendesk also announced Conversational Commerce, designed to connect brands with shoppers throughout their digital customer experience (CX) journey to provide direct support, marketing, and sales all from within a conversation.

The new Conversational Commerce capabilities equip companies with service personalisation, allowing agents to action abandoned carts, support active carts, inform customers on nearby stock to complete purchases, and share feature promotions; sales acceleration by enabling agents to identify new revenue opportunities by understanding any shopper’s complete purchase history, merchandise preferences and browsing journey, and unified data at scale, using AI to automate conversions and recommendations.

“While we’ve seen huge shifts in the way people shop over the past few years, one thing has remained constant – people prefer to communicate via messaging. Now that digital is the new storefront, businesses will be able to use Conversational Commerce, built on our powerful messaging platform, to create a richer, more dynamic and interactive experience with their customers, which will ultimately lead to increased loyalty and revenue,” Zendesk chief technology officer, Adrian McDermott said.

Zendesk is also deepening its partnerships with Meta’s WhatsApp and Shopify to further enhance businesses’ CX strategies and empower them to create a better shopping journey. The combination of Zendesk and Meta’s WhatsApp will give businesses the ability to communicate with customers and offer a buying experience without leaving the conversation. Zendesk’s Conversational Commerce and Shopify’s ecommerce platform allow agents to incorporate product catalogues, checkout processes and promotions into their CX management approaches.