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

Yes. Zendesk AI agents can use information from outside your help center after 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 do not 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

A second Zendesk account

Confluence sites and spaces

Sharepoint

Google Drive

Web-crawled content from public or authenticated websites

External records ingested through the Federated Search API

CSV or markdown files

Content managed within Knowledge

Box

Dropbox

Jira

Freshdesk

Note: PDF support for Knowledge connectors is now in an early access program (EAP). To participate, see Enrolling in the EAP.

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 it generates replies.

For more information, see:

Importing knowledge sources for an advanced AI agent

Connecting Google Drive as an external knowledge source