Can AI agents search for answers outside of my help center?

Question

I want my AI agent to provide answers based on the information outside of my help center articles. Can I use external documentation sources to train it?

Answer

Zendesk AI agents can use information from outside your help center once you import or connect it as part of your knowledge sources. AI Agents - Essential, legacy AI agents, or agents with the Advanced AI add‑on can all reference external content through Knowledge

AI agents don't search live data or the internet in real time. Instead, they use imported or synchronized information from other platforms and websites. Supported knowledge sources include:

Zendesk, Salesforce, or Freshdesk help centers

Confluence sites and spaces

Sharepoint

Web‑crawled content from public or authenticated websites

External records ingested through the Federated Search API

CSV or markdown files

Content managed within Knowledge

You can add multiple knowledge sources to the same AI agent.

For community posts, you can manually extract the relevant content and convert it into a supported format, such as CSV, markdown, or plaintext, then upload it as a knowledge source.

Any external source added to Knowledge or ingested through the Federated Search API can be used by AI agents to create AI‑generated answers to customer questions.

The AI agent uses the imported information when generating its replies.

For more information, see these articles:

Announcing support for multiple knowledge sources in AI agents

Importing knowledge sources for an advanced AI agent.