Announcing the removal of the custom escalation setting from the AI agents - Advanced dialogue builder

Announced on | Rollout starts | Rollout ends
April 30, 2026 | May 18, 2026 | May 25, 2026

Zendesk is removing the custom escalation option from the AI agents - Advanced dialogue builder.

This announcement answers the following questions:

What’s changing?

Why is Zendesk making this change?

What do I need to do?

What’s changing?

Custom escalations are going away. Following the rollout, you will no longer see Escalation blocks with the “Custom escalation” setting in the dialogue builder. Custom escalation blocks will be converted to regular AI agent message blocks to better reflect their functionality.

To ensure you're not losing any important information, AI agent message blocks that have been transformed from Escalation blocks with the “Custom escalation” setting will automatically have an action added to them that adds a custom_escalation_block label to the conversation.

Historical conversations with the custom escalation status will automatically receive that same label as well. For more information about viewing historical conversations, see Reviewing conversation logs for advanced AI agents.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

Since custom escalations don't end the conversation or directly escalate to a human agent, we're no longer treating them as escalations. Custom escalations don't fit well into the definition of an escalation, and transforming them into AI agent messages will represent their true functionality more accurately.

This change is a follow-up to our conversation status unification in AI agents.

What do I need to do?

No action is needed from you. Escalation blocks in your dialogues with the “Custom escalation” setting will be automatically converted to AI agent message blocks, which better reflect what they actually do—send a message without ending the conversation.

For billing, conversations ending with these message blocks won't be automatically counted as fully resolved by Zendesk's AI. If the conversation continues and additional use cases are triggered or knowledge answers are provided, the resolution status may change.

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.