Announcing required action to prepare third-party bot integrations for AI agent tickets to avoid duplicate tickets

Announced on | Rollout on
April 22, 2026 | May 4, 2026

Starting May 4, 2026, Zendesk will enforce the creation of AI agent tickets for all bot-handled conversations, not just the conversations that are escalated to human agents.

If you’ve integrated a third-party bot with your Zendesk account that is configured to create tickets for bot-only conversations, you need to take action to ensure that duplicate tickets are not created when the AI agent tickets feature is turned on.

This announcement contains the following topics:

What's changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

Related announcements:

Announcing the general availability of AI agent conversations as tickets in Support and Agent Workspace

Announcing AI agent tickets turned on by default for specific Pods

What's changing

Previously, third-party bot conversations lived outside Zendesk. Transcripts could be added as internal notes in tickets when conversations were escalated. Custom webhooks or workarounds could be used to create tickets manually.

Going forward, AI agent tickets will become the exclusive ticket creation mechanism for conversations handled and resolved by AI agents and third-party bots. This change ensures that these interactions are visible in the Agent Workspace, auditable for GDPR compliance, and clearly marked as auto-resolved.

Note: Third-party bot interactions do not incur automated resolution charges. AI agent tickets are created for third-party bot conversations for visibility, but they don't generate automated resolution charges. This change does not increase your bot-related costs.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

AI agent tickets help ensure you have a complete record of every customer interaction, which is essential for compliance, reporting, and service quality. AI agent tickets provide you with:

Complete visibility: Every customer interaction is tracked, whether handled by a bot or a human.

Audit trail: There is a full conversation history for compliance and quality assurance. The transcripts include individual messages, timestamps, and proper threading for structured, readable exchanges. Upon escalation, human agents get the context necessary to see exactly what happened before escalation.

Regulatory compliance: It’s easier to meet GDPR, data retention, and customer communication requirements with complete conversation records. You can also redact sensitive data from bot conversations when needed.

Unified insight: You can understand the full customer journey with all customer interactions in a single source of truth. Bot performance metrics can be measured alongside human agent performance.

Availability of AI features: Intelligent triage can analyze third-party bot conversations. Agent copilot has access to bot interaction history for better suggestions. Sentiment analysis and other AI features work across all conversations.

What do I need to do?

To avoid duplicate tickets and ensure a smooth transition to AI agent tickets, you should perform the following steps in advance of May 4, 2026:

Audit your existing ticket creation logic to avoid duplicate tickets.

Review any custom integrations or workflows that create tickets from third-party bot conversations.

Look for "create ticket" actions in your bot platform.

Check for custom webhooks that generate tickets based on bot events.

If you want to attach additional metadata to solved tickets, use the releaseControl action.

Test and update your internal processes.

Test the integration in a sandbox environment, if possible, before May 4.

Train your support team on the AI agent ticket format, as needed.

Disable legacy ticket creation.

AI agent tickets will automatically be created starting on May 4, unless you turn on AI agent tickets in advance.

Turn off any manual ticket creation to prevent duplicates.

For additional guidance, see How to eliminate duplicate tickets and adopt the new AI Agent ticket model for AI Agents Advanced.

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.