The Pulse
Zendesk Ships Industry and Custom AI Agents for Business Workflows
Zendesk introduced Industry and Custom AI Agents designed to complete specialized commerce and business workflows across connected systems.
AI.info Team ·
Zendesk introduced a new class of specialized AI agents on September 14, 2026, separating the product into two tracks: Industry Agents for common work within a sector and Custom Agents built around an individual company’s policies, systems and expertise.
The company says the agents can automate up to 80% of workflows. The launch starts with commerce, where the systems can help shoppers place orders, manage returns and exchanges, resolve delivery problems and process refunds. Zendesk positions the release as a move beyond generic support bots toward agents that can complete multi-step work.
“The era of generic, one-size-fits-all AI agents is over. The best agents are specialists: deeply grounded in the work, the industry, and the business they serve,” said Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering and AI, Zendesk. “Specialized Agents give organizations the expertise and context to take on more complex work, earn trust, and drive quantitative impact.”
Commerce is Zendesk’s first industry target
Zendesk’s first Industry Agents are designed for retail and commerce workflows that often cross several operational systems. The company names Shopify, Narvar, Stripe and Riskified as connected systems that agents can use to retrieve information and take action without requiring a customer or service employee to move between separate applications.
Risk decisions are part of the launch. Zendesk says it is working with Riskified to bring the company’s risk intelligence into returns, refunds and exchange workflows, with the stated aim of helping retailers reduce fraud and policy abuse while making faster decisions about legitimate customers.
“Zendesk Industry Agents are the AI-first platform redefining retail service at scale,” Jeff Otto, Chief Marketing Officer of Riskified, said in the announcement. He said the integration would help agents identify who they are engaging with while protecting retailers from fraud and abuse losses.
Agent Builder puts company policy into the workflow
Custom Agents address work that does not fit a standard industry template. Zendesk’s no-code Agent Builder lets customers define the job an agent owns, the systems it may access, the actions it can take and the points at which a human must approve a decision.
The agents can also run proactively in response to business events or on a schedule, rather than waiting for a customer to start a conversation. That gives the product a wider remit than answer generation: a Custom Agent might be assigned a defined operational process and allowed to carry it through across connected systems, subject to the rules its administrators set.
Zendesk says customers have run more than 1 million Custom Agent executions within seven weeks of launch. The company also says some customers saw automated resolution rates rise by 10% after deployment, though it does not provide a broader customer sample or methodology in the release.
SodaStream and Tonies test business-specific service
The announcement cites SodaStream and Tonies as customers using customized workflows. Leora Machlis, director of global customer care at SodaStream, said the company wants to resolve issues from beginning to end and adjust integrations as customer needs change.
Tonies uses the technology in a different product context. “When a Toniebox isn’t working, it’s not just a technical issue—it’s a toddler waiting,” Lauren Cooper, Director of Global Customer Happiness at Tonies, said in Zendesk’s release. She said parents want immediate answers rather than another hold or a lengthy support exchange.
Zendesk keeps Salesforce and ServiceNow in the picture
Industry and Custom Agents can run inside Zendesk as well as in service environments including Salesforce and ServiceNow. The arrangement lets companies add Zendesk’s specialized agents without replacing the platforms that already hold customer records, workflows or service operations.
Zendesk also says it will expand Industry Agents beyond commerce into financial services, media and technology. The company frames the new products as part of its Autonomous Service Workforce initiative, announced at its 2026 Relate conference, where it presented AI agents as systems that take on more service work while businesses retain control over permissions, actions and approvals.
The immediate release is narrower than that broader vision: one industry package, a no-code construction tool and a set of integrations aimed at turning service requests into completed transactions. Zendesk’s published evidence for adoption is the 1 million-execution figure and customer examples from SodaStream and Tonies.