Announcing templated opening and closing email responses for AI agents with agentic AI

Announced on | Rollout on
August 25, 2026 | August 25, 2026

We're excited to announce the ability to configure your own opening and closing lines for email AI agents with agentic AI.

This announcement answers the following questions:

What's changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What's changing?

Admins can now define their own opening and closing lines for the emails their AI agents send with agentic AI, instead of relying on AI-generated text. Previously, these email AI agents used generative AI to compose the opening and closing lines of every email reply—for example, "Good morning," or "Best regards,". These lines couldn't be edited, so the greeting and sign-off varied from reply to reply.

With this update, a new Email content page in your AI agent's configuration lets you set a static opening line and closing line. You can personalize the greeting with the requester's name (for example, "Dear <customer name>,"), and you can define separate templates for each language your AI agent is configured to support.

If you don't configure a template, nothing changes: your AI agent continues to generate opening and closing lines as it does today.

Note the following limitations for this release:

The email footer remains static and can't be edited.

Templates aren't translated automatically. You provide your own version of each template for every language you support.

Templates are fixed strings. The AI agent doesn't adjust their grammar, so languages with gender- or case-sensitive forms (such as the vocative case in Polish) may need wording that avoids inflected names.

For more information, see Configuring an AI agent’s opening and closing lines in email responses.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

We've heard your feedback that you want direct control over how your AI agents open and close emails. Your feedback pointed to three gaps:

Personalization: You want to greet end users by name rather than with a generic, time-based greeting.

Brand consistency: Businesses have specific sign-off styles and tone needs that generated text doesn't reliably match.

Predictability: Admins want the same opening and closing lines on every reply, not variable output.

Making opening and closing lines configurable puts control in your hands, in the same place you configure the rest of your AI agent.

What do I need to do?

No action is required. Email templates are automatically available to all accounts using email AI agents with agentic AI starting August 25, 2026.

Your AI agents continue to generate opening and closing lines until you configure templates of your own. When you're ready to customize them, see Customizing an AI agent’s opening and closing lines.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk customer support.