Zendesk facilitates 54% of internal tickets with AI

As organizations increasingly look to AI to transform service, Zendesk set out to create an employee support experience where AI could resolve routine requests, agents could focus on higher-value work, and employees could get help through a single, connected experience.

Supporting more than 6,000 employees across 25 locations worldwide, the company manages roughly 10,000 employee requests every month. Today, AI facilitates 54 percent of Zendesk’s internal support tickets, resolves 28 percent in a single interaction, and has helped save more than 21,000 hours while contributing to a 96 percent employee satisfaction score. Those results didn’t come from AI alone. They were built on a foundation of unified service, consistent knowledge, and shared governance.

“Zendesk has always used Zendesk,” says Doug Redo, Senior Director of IT Engineering at Zendesk. “But when I joined Zendesk 12 years ago, it was the wild, wild West.”

IT operated in one environment. HR operated in another. Legal, procurement, marketing, creative, and other teams each managed internal service independently. In total, employees navigated 17 separate support instances, each with different processes, knowledge bases, and reporting structures.

“Employee experiences are meant to be a single, seamless journey,” says Christian Broussard, Vice President of IT at Zendesk. “Instead of treating IT and HR as distinct service functions, we approach them as a single, connected system.”

Zendesk focused on building the foundation needed to support employees at scale, unifying internal support before layering in AI and custom solutions to deliver faster, more frictionless experiences across the organization.

“AI will not fix a fragmented service model,” says Broussard. “If knowledge is inconsistent, governance is unclear, and workflows are outdated, every new capability becomes harder to adopt and scale.”

Building the foundation for a better employee experience

To create a more connected experience, Zendesk moved its People Transformation and Operations organization into the IT organization while maintaining close partnership with People leadership. The new structure created a unified employee service strategy with shared accountability across IT and HR.

“With our fusion team in place, we’ve been able to gain a more holistic view of how we serve employees and align on one shared vision for the digital employee experience,” says Broussard. “Decisions are clearer, teams can move faster, and accountability is shared.”

To support the new model, Zendesk established a Technology Platform team that brings together stakeholders across internal support teams. The group evaluates new capabilities, prioritizes investments, standardizes implementations, and drives adoption across teams.

“This team has played a critical role in creating a consistent way to evaluate and prioritize new capabilities, standardizing how they are implemented across teams, and building feedback loops to improve over time and drive adoption,” says Broussard.

Creating one front door for every employee

With the organizational foundation and operating model in place, Zendesk consolidated 17 fragmented support instances and created a single Employee Help Center powered by Zendesk.

“That gave us a single front door for every employee, across every department—globally,” says Broussard.

The unified environment created a more connected experience for employees, stronger collaboration across support teams, and greater visibility for leadership.

“As we think about creating a single point of entry for our employees to get help, we’re leveraging an integrated instance that has both the People Operations team and the IT team,” says Redo. “That way, the employee only has one entry point to get help—no matter what their question may be.”

The consolidation effort was made possible through capabilities including Department Spaces, which allows internal support teams to maintain unique experiences within a shared instance, and Omnichannel Routing, which ensures requests are automatically assigned to the right teams based on skills, availability, and capacity.

Zendesk is also expanding its use of Service Catalog to provide structured service intake for requests such as onboarding, hardware support, and access management.

“Once the foundation was unified, innovation became dramatically easier to scale,” says Redo.

Scaling service with AI

With a unified foundation in place, Zendesk focused on helping employees get answers faster while freeing service teams to focus on higher-value work.

The company deployed Zendesk Copilot to assist agents with ticket summaries, writing assistance, macro recommendations, and similar-ticket suggestions. Zendesk also rolled out AI Agents across messaging and email channels.

Employees can now receive instant answers to common questions, search knowledge, and resolve routine requests without waiting for human intervention. When additional support is needed, requests are routed to the appropriate team.

“Those domain owners shouldn’t be solving tickets,” says Redo. “They should be building and engineering.”

Since launching AI-powered employee service experiences:

• 54 percent of employee tickets are now facilitated by AI

• 28 percent are resolved through one-touch AI interactions

• More than 21,000 hours saved

• 96 percent employee CSAT achieved

Extending the platform to support real-world needs

Zendesk also leveraged the flexibility of its platform to address unique employee service requirements. During the consolidation process, teams handling sensitive information needed stronger controls around confidentiality and access management.

“When you bring the People Operations group into a single instance, you’re going to inherit all of their security and compliance requirements,” says Redo.

To address those requirements, Zendesk developed a custom Secure Comments application, which enables private conversations directly within tickets while restricting visibility to authorized users. The capability allows teams handling sensitive employee information to keep confidential workflows within Zendesk while maintaining strict privacy and compliance requirements.

Service transformation starts with the foundation

Looking back on the journey, Zendesk’s leaders believe the biggest lesson is that successful service transformation begins long before AI. Organizational alignment, governance, knowledge management, and process design all created the conditions that allowed AI and automation to succeed.

The company also learned that technology alone is not enough. Adoption requires intentional effort, clear governance, and repeatable processes for continuous improvement. New capabilities create the most value when organizations have a clear model for rollout, adoption, and ongoing optimization.

For Zendesk, the transformation reinforced a simple idea:

“We’re not thinking about it as an IT experience and a people experience,” says Redo. “We’re thinking about it as an end-to-end employee experience.”