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Zendesk has introduced Employee Service AI Agents and Advanced Action Flows, tools designed to resolve employee service requests from start to finish.
The launch is aimed at internal support work handled by IT, HR and workplace teams, including onboarding, offboarding, access approvals, laptop management, employment verification letters and badge access.
The two products are designed to work together. Employee Service AI Agents identify what an employee is asking for and determine the next step, while Advanced Action Flows executes administrator-built workflows based on organisational policies.
The products have already seen early use. In the first five weeks of early access, 300 customers ran 6 million workflow executions, which Zendesk estimated saved 500,000 hours of manual work, based on a benchmark of five minutes per workflow.
Zendesk is positioning the release around a common problem in employee support operations, where requests often pass through several teams and systems before completion. A new starter request, for example, can involve hardware setup, system access and documentation, with delays emerging when work depends on manual handoffs and separate approvals.
Workflow creation
Part of the launch focuses on how internal teams build automation. Zendesk said IT administrators can create, test and refine workflows using natural language prompts rather than manually setting up drag-and-drop processes.
The approach is intended to reduce the technical effort involved in building automations for internal support tasks. Advanced Action Flows can also help teams identify integrations and generate the business logic needed to connect systems involved in a process.
In daily tools
Employees can submit requests through workplace applications they already use, including Slack and Microsoft Teams. The AI agent then coordinates work across back-end systems, so employees do not need to move between applications or chase progress through different channels.
Zendesk framed the release as part of a broader shift from answering individual employee questions to completing the related task or process. That means automating a sequence of steps across systems rather than stopping at a chatbot response or single action.
Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering, and AI at Zendesk, set out that position in a statement on the launch. "AI should do more than answer employees' questions - it should help get their work done the way they intended to. Too often, employees lose time chasing approvals and navigating internal systems instead of doing the work they were hired to do. With Advanced Action Flows, our specialised AI agents can draw on workflows that move employee requests through the steps needed to reach a resolution. That's the promise of an agentic employee experience: less friction for employees and more time for the work that matters," said Upadhyay.
Kellie Hackney, Vice President, Australia and New Zealand at Zendesk, linked the launch to workplace efficiency for local organisations. "Lifting workplace productivity across Australian organisations means eliminating the internal friction that stalls momentum. Lost time spent chasing approvals and navigating disconnected systems is a hidden tax on employee output. Bringing Employee Service AI Agents and Advanced Action Flows together gives businesses a practical way to eliminate that friction and resolve complex requests end-to-end, right in the channels employees use every day," said Hackney.
The products are available through Zendesk's open early access programme, with reported usage levels suggesting demand for tools that automate internal service processes across multiple teams and systems.