What are my chatbot options with Zendesk?

Question

My company is pursuing chat bot solutions. How can we do that with Zendesk?

I want to access a comparison of the options.

Answer

Depending on the level of complexity you need and the resources available to you, explore multiple options.

At its most basic, AI agents use your help center content to generate clear, conversational, on-brand replies that resolve customer questions across messaging, email, and web form. AI agents automate interactions and improve efficiency and productivity. This product enhances personalization and reduces operational costs.

For more information on AI agents, see this article: Understanding everywhere you can use AI agents.

AI agents - Essential

With messaging on your account, you have access to the AI agents - Essential product. You can create AI agents across messaging, email, and web form channels in its most basic form. AI agents can have back-and-forth conversations with your customers with your help center content. AI agents can now generate full, personalized replies over email and web form using your help center content, no need to set up messaging first. You can enable email and web form for an existing AI agent or create a new one in Admin Center.

Legacy AI agent

Note: If you drafted or published an AI agent as of February 2, 2025, you will have access to the legacy AI agent functionality.

You can build conversations in a tool called bot builder (Legacy). Start by an AI agent to automatically resolve customer issues and interact with your customers. You can create multiple unique AI agents for different brands, languages, locales, and departments. Once you have your bots built, you populate them with answers. Each answer addresses one particular customer question or issue, also known as an intent. Over time, you can create training phrases so the AI agent gets better. If you don't have an answer already configured, then AI agents simply fall back on article recommendations search.

AI agents - Advanced

With the purchase of the AI agents - Advanced add-on in your subscription, you will access:

Conversation flows in more than 79 languages

Multiple content sources

Generative replies

Zero-training AI agents

Integrations and hybrid flows

For a full overview of the features, see this article: Features included in each level.

For more information, see this section: Using AI agents - Advanced.

Sunshine Conversations and third-party solutions

You can use Sunshine Conversation APIs to connect to multiple messaging sources and extend the customization of your experience with third-party solutions. This product implementation requires the help of your own developer.

See these articles for more information:

Sunshine Conversations Overview

SunCo Chatbots

Other third-party solutions

You are also able to integrate third-party AI software to the Zendesk API for your needs.

Warning: Zendesk Customer Support is not able to assist with this implementation, as our ability to answer questions about third-party software is limited.