About employee service AI agents (EAP)

A default ES AI agent is created when a help center is activated for a brand.
Support admins can create and deploy additional ES AI agents to other supported
platforms, including Slack or Microsoft Teams. Support admins or Knowledge
admins can connect to knowledge sources for ES AI agents.



What's my plan?






Employee Service Suite

Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus







You can
add Employee service (ES) AI agents your Zendesk help center, Slack channels,
and Microsoft
Teams channels to answer questions and provide information based on connected
knowledge
sources.


A default ES AI agent is created when a help center is activated for
a brand. Support admins
can create and deploy additional ES AI agents to other supported platforms,
including Slack or
Microsoft Teams. Support admins or Knowledge admins can connect to knowledge
sources for ES AI
agents.

This article contains the following topics:


Understanding employee service AI agent
configuration and deployment


Understanding employee service AI agent
permissions and sharing





Understanding employee service AI agent configuration and deployment



Support admins on Employee Service Suite plans can create ES AI agents.
This involves
configuring the knowledge sources and settings that the ES AI agent
uses, and selecting apps
and resource types that the ES AI agent can use to answer questions
in channels where it is
deployed. Knowledge admins can control which knowledge sources are
connected to the account
and available for use by ES AI agents, and then Support admins specify
which sources each ES
AI agent can access.


For each ES AI agent, you can
choose to connect
tools
for:


Web search: Allows the AI agent
to search the general internet, or you can
nominate specific specific sites to be used as a knowledge
source.


File search: Allows the AI
agent to reference specific files that were
uploaded.


Enterprise search: Allows the
AI agent to search connected apps.


Opening a ticket: Allows the
AI agent to create a Zendesk ticket by extracting
the subject and body from the user's query and identifying
the requester and brand.


Action catalog: Allows the
AI agent to tap into available triggers to guide its
responses and next steps.




The following knowledge sources are supported for ES AI agents:


Box


Confluence


Google Drive


Notion


Seismic


SharePoint


Slack


Microsoft Teams


Web crawlers
to third-party sites

Zendesk (only brands within the same instance)



You can provide the ES AI agent with instructions for:


Persona


Behavior


Guardrails


Tool usage.




To support users to generate useful prompts, you can create quick
prompt templates with
variables to be populated by the user.


You can deploy ES AI agents in the following locations:


Zendesk help center: The default
AI agent, automatically created and deployed
for the primary brand of the Zendesk instance, is labelled
as Default in Admin Center.
Each time an additional brand is created, a new ES AI agent
is also created; these are
not be labelled. You can modify the channel deployment settings
for the ES AI agent if
you want to change the default AI agent for help center search.
You can remove a help
center from an ES AI agent’s channel settings, which reverts
the help center search
experience to the return the search results page instead
of launching a chat, and to
only search in articles.


Slack: Configure the channel
deployment settings for the ES AI agent to include
Slack.


Microsoft Teams: Configure
the channel deployment settings for the ES AI agent
to include Microsoft Teams.




See
Creating, editing and deploying employee service AI agents.





Understanding employee service AI agent permissions and sharing



Support admins create and manage ES AI agents. However, the ES AI
agent inherits
permissions based on the permissions of the admin who connected a
knowledge source. The AI
agent draws information from knowledge in specified connected apps.
Sources can be removed
from the AI agent as required.


The channel an agent is deployed to dictates how its permissions
are applied. It it
therefore sometimes necessary to make a distinction between admins
in general and the admin
who created the agent or added a knowledge source. In this case,
they are referred to as the
agent creator.


Help center deployment: The
agent uses the interacting user's permissions to
answer. If the user does not have permission to see a source,
it won't be used in the
agent's response.


Slack DM deployment (default agent):
The agent uses the interacting user's
permissions to answer. If the user does not have permission
to see a source, it won't be
used in the agent's response.


Slack and Microsoft Teams channel deployment:
The agent uses the agent
creator's permissions.




Only Support admins can create and modify ES AI agent configurations.
When an ES AI agent
is created, it is automatically shared with all AI agent admins,
who receive editor access.
Different permissions apply to editing and viewing AI agent knowledge
sources, based on
source permissions, the admin who connected the knowledge source,
and the permissions of the
agent creator.


If a linked app is removed from the list of connected sources, the
app link is disabled. To
fully remove the knowledge source, an admin must delete it. The admin
or agent creator can
re-add the link at any time.




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