Announcing instructions for all AI agents

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
July 28, 2025 | July 28, 2025 | July 31, 2025

Instructions allow you to tailor your AI agent’s generative responses. This capability, which was previously available only for the AI agents - Advanced add-on, can now be leveraged by all AI agent customers.

This announcement includes the following topics:

What’s changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What’s changing?

Previously, AI agent customization was limited to persona and business profile settings. With this update, you can now provide more detailed and customized instructions to guide AI agent behavior. Some examples may include instructing your AI agent to:

Follow an in-house style guide

Format answers in a specific away

Avoid certain words or phrases

These instructions enhance the potential to solve more customer requests without requiring human intervention, while preserving a precise level of control that helps you protect your brand.

For more information, see Using instructions to influence AI agent responses.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

AI agents, powered by generative AI, help you start automating support in just a few clicks. But scaling shouldn’t mean sacrificing control or response quality. Instructions give you a simple, powerful way to guide how your AI agent responds in specific scenarios—so you can stay in control of generative AI and drive consistency across every customer interaction

What do I need to do?

The instructions feature is being automatically rolled out to all accounts over the next few days. After it’s been rolled out to your account, you can immediately begin creating instructions for new and existing AI agents.

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.