Automatically classifying tickets with intelligent triage

Intelligent triageuses AI to automatically classify new customer support tickets by topic, sentiment, language, and entities, such as product names. By incorporating these AI classifications into your workflows, you can automate repeatable requests, eliminate manual triage, guide agents in real time, and act quickly on high-risk tickets.


What's my plan?







Add-on

Copilot







Summary: ◀▼
Use intelligent triage to automatically classify new tickets by topic, sentiment, and language, helping you reduce manual triage, route requests, guide agents, and spot high-risk tickets faster. You can configure each classification type, choose channels, set dynamic detection for topic and sentiment, exclude agent-created tickets, and use the results in workflows, views, routing, and reporting.





Intelligent triage classifications are available on Suite and Support Professional plans and above. Using them in workflows requires the Copilot add-on.
Intelligent triage uses AI to automatically
classify new customer support tickets by topic, sentiment, language, and entities, such
as product names. By incorporating these AI classifications into your workflows, you can
automate repeatable requests, eliminate manual triage, guide agents in real time, and
act quickly on high-risk tickets.
This article describes how admins configure intelligent triage topic, sentiment, and
language detection settings. To configure entity settings, see Classifying unique information in tickets with entities.
This article contains the following topics:

Understanding intelligent triage fields
Configuring intelligent triage settings
Next steps

Related articles:

Improving topic quality with personalized
recommendations
Personalizing intelligent triage by creating
custom topics
Viewing intelligent triage classifications in
tickets



Understanding intelligent triage fields


Note: If you purchased the Copilot add-on before June 11, 2026, you'll see "Intent"
instead of "Topic" in your ticket fields, views, triggers, automations, macros,
SLAs, queues, and the ticket API until later in 2026. Additionally, your intelligent
triage fields will continue to be custom fields and generate associated tags.
Intelligent triage classifications are supported for tickets started with a public
comment by either an agent or end user. The Zendesk machine learning model
automatically classifies your tickets when intelligent triage is turned on, and
populates the following standard fields:










Field
What it classifies
Possible values
Notes




Topic (Intent)
What the ticket is about
Industry-specific prebuilt values that you can view on the Topics page, or
personalize with custom values

Can be updated on each end user reply if dynamic detection is
configured. Topic values can only be edited from the Topic
page, not ticket field settings.



Sentiment
Feeling of the end user at the time they reached out
Very Positive, Positive, Neutral, Negative, Very Negative. See
Viewing intelligent triage
classifications in tickets.
Can be updated on each end user reply if dynamic detection is
configured. Calibrated for customer service contexts, meaning
that a ticket isn't assigned a negative sentiment just because a
customer has an issue.



Language
The language the ticket is written in
Approximately 150 languages

Isn't updated on each end user reply.




Each field has an associated confidence field indicating how likely the
classification is accurate. Agents can update field values if necessary.
See Additional ticket fields for the Copilot
add-on for the full list of the standard intelligent triage fields.



Configuring intelligent triage settings

You can configure topic, sentiment, and language settings individually in Admin
Center.
If you have a Suite or Support Professional plan, you must complete the onboarding
guide to set up intelligent triage. If you have the Copilot add-on and are setting
up intelligent triage for the first time, or haven't set up workflows yet, an
onboarding guide will appear to help you configure your settings and build your
first workflows. You can access the onboarding guide at any time from Manage
settings on any classification type page.
If you have the Copilot add-on, all classification types are turned on by default.
Otherwise, classifications are turned off by default. To turn off these settings,
see Turning off topic, sentiment, language, or entity
settings.
To configure intelligent triage settings

In Admin Center, click
AI in the sidebar, then select the classification type you want to
configure: Topic, Sentiment, or Language.
Click Manage Settings.
(Topic and Sentiment only) To update a ticket's classification based on the
latest end user message, select the checkbox under Dynamic
detection.
Dynamic detection applies to only new tickets created after you
turn this setting on.

Under Channels, configure the channels you want to classify:
For Email and async channels, click the drop-down, then select or
deselect the channels. The Web form, Email, and Web service (API)
channels are selected by default. If you create tickets via channel integrations,
select Social messaging.
The Closed tickets channel is for
follow-up
tickets.

For Messaging channels, click the drop-down, then select or
deselect the channels. The Web Widget, WhatsApp, and Facebook
Messenger channels are selected by default.
Selecting any one
of the Web Widget, iOS SDK, Android SDK, or Native Messaging
channels automatically selects all four channels together.

Select the Voice checkbox to classify post-call
transcripts.
Call transcription must be turned
on and transcripts must be shown on tickets to be
classified.



To exclude tickets created by agents, select the checkbox under Exclusion
conditions.

Click Save.




Next steps

After configuring intelligent triage, complete your setup by:


Creating entities to classify unique
information in tickets, such as product names

Creating custom topics to personalize
intelligent triage for your specific business needs

Configuring the agent experience to
control how classifications are displayed to agents

Creating workflows based on
intelligent triage classifications to automate ticket routing, deflection, and
prioritization.

Creating views, setting up routing, and analyzing performance using
intelligent triage classifications



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