Using restricted help center content in AI agent responses

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All Suites | Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

Support | Team, Professional, or Enterprise

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

To use restricted help center content in your AI agent, it's essential that you understand what constitutes restricted content, where you can use it in an AI agent, and the settings across Zendesk you need to consider and configure.

In this article, we’ll explain these concepts and tasks and direct you to Zendesk resources that can help you incorporate restricted help center content into your AI agent. You may find that not all of the suggestions in this article apply to your configuration; just use the information that applies to your use case.

This article includes the following topics:

About restricted content

Authenticating end users

Using restricted content in AI agent responses

About restricted content

There are two ways you can restrict content in your help center:

Using the Require sign-in option, which restricts all content in the help center to authenticated and signed-in end users.

AI agents support this type of restriction. AI-generated answers will be available only for end users who are signed in to your help center.

Setting view permissions (on Suite Growth plans and above) to restrict access to specific articles. Access to categories and sections is based on article settings.

AI agents support this type of restriction. Restricted articles are used in AI-generated answers only for end users whose user segment(s) match the article’s view permissions.

When you apply restrictions to one of these elements, they apply to all elements below it in the help center hierarchy:

When Require sign-in is selected in Knowledge admin security settings, the entire help center is restricted; all categories, sections, and articles are also restricted and require users to sign in for access.

When an article is restricted, all comments in that article are also restricted, and users must sign in for access.

When all articles in a section are restricted, that section only appears to signed-in users.

When all sections in a category are restricted, that category only appears to signed-in users.

Authenticating end users

End users may be able to view restricted content in a help center using a simple sign-in procedure. However, to view restricted content through an AI agent, you need to take additional steps to be authenticated by Zendesk.

To view restricted help center content in an AI agent on a messaging channel:

The end user must already exist as a user in your Zendesk account.

The end user must be authenticated via messaging JWT, including mapping them to user records.

The external ID passed via the JWT authentication must be associated with the user in Zendesk via the external ID field.

Note: Optionally, you can turn on help center authentication to automatically associate user identities with end users logged in to the help center.

To view restricted help center content in an AI agent on an email or web form channel:

The end user must be part of a user segment that has viewing permissions for the article.

Using restricted content in AI agent responses

When you configure the settings described above, authenticated customers can view restricted content from help center articles in responses from your AI agent.

Additionally, these settings let authenticated customers view restricted content in the following legacy AI agent functionality:

If the AI agent finds relevant information standard response

Show help center articles step type in an AI agent answer