Announcing an update of the Understood conversations metric in the AI agents - Advanced reporting dashboard

Announced on | Rollout on
April 27, 2026 | May 5, 2026

We’ve updated the way the Understood conversations metric is calculated in the AI agents - Advanced reporting dashboard.

This announcement answers the following questions:

What’s changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What’s changing?

For AI agents with agentic AI, conversations that were directly escalated to a human agent—meaning no use case, dialogue, generative procedure, or agentic reply was triggered—were previously considered “not understood.” However, by definition, the AI agent correctly understood the conversation and followed the correct path.

Now, these types of directly escalated conversations are included in the Understood conversations metric, which appears in the Performance section of the Overview tab.

The impact of this change may result in a higher number of Understood conversations in your dashboard.

For more information, see Analyzing advanced AI agent performance with the reporting dashboard.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

This change ensures the metric more accurately reflects how the AI agent handled the conversation. In cases of directly escalated conversations, the system correctly routed the conversation to a human agent, so these interactions are better classified as understood.

What do I need to do?

No action is required from you. We recommend keeping this change in mind when reviewing the reporting dashboard, especially if the Understood conversations metric is referenced in any custom reports within your organization.

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.