How do I better understand how AI agents suggest articles and respond to questions?

Question

How does my legacy AI agent choose which article to suggest for my question? Does my question need to match the title or instructions exactly?

Answer

When you set up an AI agent to answer questions, several factors determine how it responds to user questions and phrases. Your question doesn’t need to match a title or instructions exactly. See the FAQs below for answers to common questions about setting up an AI agent.

For Legacy AI agents: To generate a reply from an intent, does a user need to use the exact same words as the intent?

How does the bot decide to share an existing answer over a generated reply?

What if both an answer flow and an article exist? How does it decide which to display?

Note: This article describes functionality available only to customers who had a drafted or published AI agent as of February 2, 2025. For information about equivalent functionality in the AI agents - Advanced add-on, see this article: Building dialogues for AI agents - Advanced.

For Legacy AI agents and bots to generate a reply from an intent, does a user need to use the exact same words?

Legacy AI agents and bots rely on keyword or phrase matches to detect intents. If a user types the exact phrase, the AI agent is more likely to generate the correct reply. To improve understanding, you can fine-tune and update the AI agent so it recognizes new patterns and phrases over time.

If a pre-generated answer exactly matches the user’s query, the bot prioritizes the answer for consistency and accuracy. If there’s no exact match, the bot typically presents a related article instead.

In answer flows, keywords are training phrases. In articles, keywords are the words that appear in the content. See Optimizing your Virtual Agent to optimize the bot.

How does the bot decide to share an existing answer over a generated reply?

The bot first identifies the user’s intent from the query. If an exact match exists as a pre-created answer, the bot prioritizes that answer. If there’s no exact pre-created answer, the bot looks for relevant articles or knowledge base entries and generates a reply.

What if both an answer flow and an article exist? How does it decide which to display?

When both an answer flow and an article exist, the bot usually presents the article. Depending on how you prioritize bot responses in the backend, it presents the resolution accordingly. To ensure the bot delivers the outcome you want, do the following:

Fine-tune phrases and keywords: Make sure keywords in answer flows and articles match the ways users phrase their queries.

Review and test: Test different query phrases regularly to ensure the bot provides the most helpful responses.

See the articles below for other resources for training AI agents:

Optimizing your advanced AI agent performance

Best practices for creating answer flows in an AI agent (Legacy)

Getting started with AI features in the Zendesk Copilot add-on

Best practices for using instructions to influence AI agent responses

How can I train my AI agent and improve suggestions?

How do I set up my AI agent to use help center content?