Zendesk Relate 2025 - live updates from the event as it happened

TechRadar Pro was live in Las Vegas for Zendesk's annual convention, where we heared from company execs and global influencers about how AI is set revolutionize customer service and sales.

On the first day, we heard from CEO Tom Eggemeier about the new Resolution Platform before Trevor Noah took to the stage to discuss the importance of the human connection.

Day two brought former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on stage to speak about empathetic leadership in the world of AI.

Get ready to join us as we cover Zendesk's exciting updates at Relate 2025. We're expecting plenty of AI announcements over the coming days.

We're just a couple of hours away from Zendesk Relate 2025 opening its doors, and while we may not be hearing about any new products until tomorrow, we'll be laying the foundation today including hearing from Chief Legal Officer Shana Simmons about the future trends in AI regulation.

Also tomorrow, there will be a guest keynote from comedy legend Trevor Noah - definitely worth tuning in for that!

Good morning! We're about to take our seats in the main stage to hear from CEO Tom Eggemeier about Zendesk's AI plans. Stay tuned for all the updates as they happen!

We've managed to secure the prime spot to hear the announcements live from Zendesk's execs in this morning's keynotes.

A network of human agents plus service or AI agents will make the difference between simply being busy and being effective, says Eggemeier in his welcome speech, as he highlights the crucial role humans will continue to play in customer service.

This year's big launch is Zendesk Resolution Platform for agentic AI – a purpose-built platform introducing a suite of advanced tools that seamlessly integrate Zendesk AI Agents, a comprehensive knowledge graph, actions and integrations, governance and control, and measurement and insights.

And this is a big one – Zendesk is leading with two pricing models.

Outcome-based pricing will only charge you for problems that are resolved, placing an emphasis on resolution.

You'll also be able to use the flexible pricing model for a combination of AI agents and human agents.

Revealing the intricacy of the technologies that power its platform, President of Product, Engineering, and AI Shashi Upadhyay highlighted that a combination of AI agents are required to get action done and reach a resolution, due to complex customer conversations and mounting consumer expectations.

Because of that, Upadhyay is introducing the company's next-generation AI agents that can reason, learn and adapt, as well as an upgraded AI agent builder which takes natural language prompts to build the right agentic path.

Zendesk is rolling out a series of no-code Copilot enhancements, including one that can take action on behalf of human agents and integrate with third-party platforms like Jira and Slack. Previously, Copilot could only guide humans.

The second component of Zendesk's Resolution Platform is the knowledge graph, which can integrate with data like internal documentation as well as knowledge bases. Coming soon, Zendesk's knowledge graph will also work with third-party services like Confluence, Docusign and Asana.

"What if I don't have a knowledge base," asks Lisa Kant, SVP of Solutions and Product 
Marketing. The platform's new knowledge builder helps growing companies create their own knowledge base based off support tickets to address frequently asked questions automatically, with thanks to AI, of course.

In light of promoting transparency, Zendesk is launching AI reasoning controls for real-time visibility into AI agents' chains of thought, setting guardrails and establishing boundaries.

A new AI Insights Hub is also joining the Zendesk portfolio to centralize all of the AI features that are active across a company's customer service environment and highlight further AI recommendations .

CEO Tom Eggemeier has just taken to the stage once more for one last thing... Zendesk Employee Service Suite.

Having listened to "crystal clear" feedback from Zendesk's own customers, the company is addressing the fact that employee service has long been an afterthought, with workers stuck using rigid tools that don't reflect how they actually work.

Speaking to Zendesk's 17,000 customers from 136 countries, the company is launching a new tool to help internal support teams, such as IT and H,R enhance employee service with agentic AI.

"Any company that uses AI to drop its workforce is a company that's run out of ideas," Trevor Noah paraphrases from a quote he heard from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang when asked about the immediate effects of AI on the workforce.

As we listen to Trevor Noah's conversation on creating engaging, human-centered customer experiences, here's a summary of the announcements made this morning at Zendesk Relate 2025.

• Next-generation Zendesk AI agents, an upgraded AI agent builder and new Copilot enhancements
• A new knowledge graph including a knowledge builder and generative search
• The action builder for connecting and automating AI and human agent workflows and a no-code app builder
• AI reasoning controls
• Custom Quality Assurance (QA) with an AI Insights Hub
• Newly launched Zendesk Employee Service Suite

Citing Zendesk's own study, CTO Adrian McDermott and Senior Director for Technology and CX Strategy Teresa Huan highlight some of the following successes observed among CX AI adopters:

• 80% of CX leaders have seen a positive impact on first reply time
• 38% see faster full resolution time
• 78% believe AI can help tackle increased service volume
• 88% say AI helps their teams overcome communication/language barriers
• 86% say AI is increasing customer satisfaction
• 6.8 hours per week on average reported in AI
• 83% of human agents agree AI has significantly improved their job performance

Speaking about shadow AI and their chosen AI tools, Lisa Fairbanks, Global Head of CX Solutions at AWS revealed she uses Perplexity (as well as AWS' own tools). Zendesk America CTO Jason Maynard uses Claude. Both leaders recognized the importance of shadow AI in helping drive innovation and exploration, but setting guardrails is essential.

That's it for the keynotes today, but as a reminder, there are more sessions tomorrow including a conversation with ex-New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern exploring empathy, transparency and adaptability in an increasingly AI-dominated world.

Day two at Zendesk Relate 2025 is set to bring more discussions around the responsible use of AI, including a talk from former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern about empathy, transparency and adaptability in the world of AI.

“Authenticity, proximity and action” are the principles of empathetic leadership, says Jacinda Ardern, recalling the horrendous 2019 shootings in Christchurch. Those same principles apply to the ethical deployment of AI as uncertainty around its impacts continue.

Addressing employee concern over job uncertainty, Jacinda Ardern urges companies to change the narrative from fear to excitement around opportunity through reassurance.

Leaders must choose between locking everything down or embracing and guiding it, say Zendesk CIO Craig Flower and PagerDuty CIO Eric Johnson. We should encourage open dialogue between IT and business teams to understand why Shadow AI is used, create safe experimentation spaces and establish guardrails, rather than implementing an outright ban, in order to promote innovation and meet worker expectations.

That's all the keynotes over for Zendesk Relate 2025! As we work on digesting the announcements in further detail, here's a reminder of some of the updates announced this week:

• Next-generation Zendesk AI agents, an upgraded AI agent builder and new Copilot enhancements
• A new knowledge graph including a knowledge builder and generative search
• The action builder for connecting and automating AI and human agent workflows and a no-code app builder
• AI reasoning controls
• Custom Quality Assurance (QA) with an AI Insights Hub
• Newly launched Zendesk Employee Service Suite