Whether its your local café remembering your name and order, or a particular brand going the extra mile to make you feel seen, personalised service cuts through the noise. In a world saturated with notifications, endless inboxes and fleeting attention spans, that kind of standout experience is more powerful to the customer, and to the business more valuable than ever.

What happens when a company is handling over 4.6 billion customer tickets and interactions a year? What if they are supporting more than 100,000 businesses across 160 countries and 60 languages? What if they take that immense volume of data, the largest CX dataset on the planet and use it to train AI that not only automates, but elevates how businesses connect with customers? You’d think you’d just hit a royal flush.

Welcome to Zendesk and their goal for the future, starting today!

From Denmark to down under

With its roots originating in Denmark and headquarters in San Francisco, Zendesk has also built a proud Australian legacy. It planted roots locally 15 years ago, and its Melbourne hub now plays a key role in the company’s global growth—with nearly 350 full-time employees, including 230 engineers helping to shape the product. Zendesk’s Aussie client roster reads like a greatest hits of innovation: REA Group, Canva, Grill’d, Freedom Furniture, The Iconic, and more.

Relating in Las Vegas

This March, I travelled from Australia to the buzzing tech mecca of Las Vegas to attend Zendesk Relate 2025. Spanning 25–27 March, the event brought together over 2,000 participants from 30+ countries, representing CX, IT, HR, and Operations.

The theme? The “Resolution Revolution”; a deep dive into how AI is transforming the way we deliver service across customer and employee touchpoints. With keynotes on generative AI, hands-on product demos, and practical strategies for automation and personalisation, the message was clear: AI isn’t just about doing more, it’s about doing better.

Introducing the Zendesk Resolution Platform

The headline announcement was Zendesk’s Resolution Platform, a next-gen AI-powered CX engine designed to move beyond case management and focus on achieving smart and fast resolutions.

“The only metric that matters in customer service is resolution,” said ZenDesk CEO Tom Eggemeier. With the roll out of their new Agentic AI bots, Tom explained it best on how they have approached this differently then those in the market. It’s not like their bots are acting similar to a swarm of flies at a picnic causing havoc, it’s like a well drilled search and rescue team ready to find a resolution for your customer.

While automation isn’t new in CX, it has often come at the cost of empathy and quality. Zendesk’s AI approach is different, it’s built to bridge the gap between human connection and scalable support. And in a bold move, the company is shifting towards outcomes-based pricing, tying its success directly to resolution outcomes, not just seats or users.

With over 10,000 businesses already using Zendesk AI, and the unveiling of its Agentic AI platform, this isn’t a promise, it’s a current day playbook. Amongst all the promises and talk in the industry its refreshing to see real world releases and use cases.

iTWire had the pleasure of sitting down with ZenDesk SVP APAC Mitch Young. Mitch has a vast history of customer experience with roles at IBM and ServiceNow and was instrumental in their growth plans. Mitch has now turned his focus on the growth opportunities that the APAC region brings around client experience and is spearheading Zendesk’s growth goals. Speaking to me about how Zendesk’s new pricing strategy is backed by the clients' sentiments that they are willing to pay for results, Mitch relayed the promise of the new pricing strategy being carved around resolutions and that customers will be able to see the value before they have to pull out their credit card.

The five pillars of the Resolution Platform

Zendesk’s AI-first strategy for its new platform is anchored in five key components:

1. AI Agents & Copilot Upgrades

These agents aren’t rule-based bots they’re adaptive, generative problem-solvers. With the new AI Agent Builder, businesses can customise agents to suit their workflows. The Copilot features allow agents to operate inside tools like Slack and Jira, pulling from internal knowledge to offer rich, context-aware help with no coding required.

2. Knowledge Graph & Generative Search

Powering over 50,000 active knowledge bases, Zendesk’s new Generative Search gives customers immediate, accurate answers whilst still maintaining access to the source references. Meanwhile, Knowledge Builder creates help articles using historical ticket data, removing the content creation burden of having to build out your own knowledge base. What’s more, translation to multiple languages is available and the ability to bulk translate is on their roadmap for a future release.

3. Action Builder & App Builder

Action Builder lets you connect workflows across platforms like Salesforce and Microsoft Teams using drag-and-drop tools. App Builder, driven by natural language prompts, allows custom app creation within Zendesk, an admin’s dream. Want an app built that will automatically find all attachments from a tickets history and present them to you. Well that sentence alone will start you on your way inside App Builder from Zendesk. Brilliant!

4. AI Governance & Reasoning Controls

With new tools to explain and control AI decisions, businesses get a clear view of how the system works and can adjust behaviours in real time, transparency meets trust. Why did AI say that? Why did the AI make that move? With the transparency built in, these questions are no longer in the dark but at the forefront of administration within Zendesk.

5. Insights & Quality Assurance

Custom QA now uses AI to review 100% of interactions and highlight areas for improvement, whether from human agents or bots. Want to see which tickets mention a competitor? No worries. The Insights Hub gives granular data and smart recommendations to keep your CX sharp and your business growing.

It is artificial intelligence that is allowing this growth for Zendesk, and it was an absolute joy to sit down with Jason Maynard, Chief Technology Officer for APAC at Zendesk to geek out and discuss AI.

The monumental growth, change and rise of language models is a near daily occurrence. With AI changes being so frequent it is important that any software company handles these changes with care. You don't want your tool's response to change unexpectedly after an update. I asked Jason how they were managing the different language model updates, and he was able to bring comfort that their robust API architecture and regression testing ensures nothing untoward gets out.

It was refreshing to see a Chief Technology Officer truly excited about the road ahead for development and how AI is playing a crucial role in that. With Zendesk new App Builder he is excited to see what new problems customers come up with to solve and what would normally take long development timeframes can now be done by almost anyone, within days. That fundamental shift and what artificial intelligence now allows smaller businesses to achieve is truly exciting, and I couldn’t agree more.

AI for Employees, Too

Zendesk didn’t stop with customers. In classic tech fashion, they had a “one more thing” moment.

The Employee Service Suite is a new offering aimed at internal teams like HR and IT. With features like HRIS integrations, service catalogues, and task automation, it’s designed to give employees the same seamless support experience that customers receive.

And it’s only just beginning, with IT Asset Management on the roadmap later in 2025, businesses will soon be able to track and manage staff equipment, licenses, and tools all within Zendesk.

Reinventing the Contact Centre

Zendesk also announced the upcoming acquisition of Local Measure, strengthening its voice and contact centre capabilities. Now powered by AWS, Zendesk for Contact Centre is set to challenge traditional CCaaS platforms with an AI-infused, easier-to-deploy alternative that’s built from the ground up with the customer journey in mind.

Real-World Impact: The Results Are In

Will Zendesk’s new AI agents and Resolution Platform really make a difference? It is often a question asked when anyone releases new features and products. Early adopters of Zendesk are saying absolutely with a resounding yes, and the results are impressive:

• Vimeo: 60% of resolved tickets handled by automation now.
• Rothko: 3x increase in productivity thanks to Copilot.
• Catapult: 20% faster resolution times for their customers.
• Wyze: Net Promoter Score (NPS) doubled, product feedback up 10%
• Freedom (AU): 90% reduction in resolution time, 20% boost in client satisfaction scores.

These aren’t future goals, they are current day, measurable outcomes from some of Zendesks 10,000 customers already using AI products.

Zendesk has transformed itself from a helpdesk, tool into a full-fledged AI-powered service platform, rethinking how businesses engage with both customers and employees. With Agentic AI at its core, Zendesk’s mission is clear: resolutions, not just responses.

For Australian businesses watching from afar, the signal from Las Vegas is crystal clear: the future of customer experience is intelligent, connected, and deeply personal.

Welcome to the Resolution Revolution.