Using an AI agent in the Slack Direct Messages channel

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This article applies to AI agents - Essential and legacy AI agent functionality.

You can add an AI agent to your Slack Direct Messages channel to deliver automated AI agent functionality to your Slack-messaging connection.

Note: This doesn't apply to the Slack for Zendesk Support integration.

This article contains the following topics:

Account requirements, feature limitations, and best practices

Adding an AI agent to your Slack DM channel

Removing an AI agent from your Slack DM channel

Account requirements, feature limitations, and best practices

Before adding an AI agent to your Slack DM configuration, your account must meet the following requirements:

Agent Workspace and messaging activated

At least one Chat-enabled agent

The Slack Direct Messages channel for Zendesk messaging activated

An AI agent (You can use a previously built AI agent or create a new one.)

Some AI agent features perform differently in the Slack DM channel than in other messaging channels:

The greeting response does not appear in the conversation.

(Legacy AI agent functionality) The Ask for details step is not available in the Slack DM channel. If it is included as part of an answer in your conversation flow, it will be bypassed.

(Legacy AI agent functionality) Panels in the Add carousel step are displayed in a list, rather than as a scrollable array. Otherwise, they function as expected.

Because of the above limitations, there are a number of best practices we recommend when creating your AI agent:

Turn off the automated fallback response.

Create a trigger to immediately close solved tickets.

(Legacy AI agent functionality) Because the greeting response is not active in the conversation, we recommend creating an answer that includes a welcome message, with conversation starters (such as “hello”) as intents.

Adding an AI agent to your Slack DM channel

When your account is ready, you can integrate the AI agent with your Slack DM channel.

To add the AI agent to your Slack DM channel

Sign in to Slack using the dedicated Zendesk user account.

In Admin Center, configure the AI agent's channels so that the Slack DM channel is selected.

Publish the AI agent.

Removing an AI agent from your Slack DM channel

If you no longer want to include an AI agent in your Slack DM channel, you can disconnect it. The channel will then resume Slack DM Support functionality.

When you disconnect the AI agent from the channel:

Conversations that have been handed off to an agent are unaffected.

If the end user interacts with the AI agent, for example by entering text or clicking a button, they are handed off to an agent. This is a “silent handoff”, and the end user will not receive an automated response or notification of the handoff until the agent responds.

To remove the AI agent from your Slack DM channel

In Admin Center, configure the AI agent's channels so that the Slack DM channel is deselected.

Publish the AI agent.

Note: Adding the AI agent to another channel automatically removes it from the Slack DM channel.