Forethought AI agents by Zendesk is an AI-powered support platform that can operate independent of the Zendesk platform to help any team automate customer service, assist human agents, route tickets, and improve support quality. Forethought AI agents offers several different capabilities that work together to make support operations faster, more consistent, and easier to manage.
This article contains the following topics:
- What is Forethought?
- How does Forethought work?
- Why should I use Forethought?
- How can I get started with Forethought?
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What is Forethought?
Forethought AI agents is an independent suite of omnichannel AI tools designed for customer support teams, even those that do not use the Zendesk platform. Its capabilities help organizations handle support requests more efficiently by automating common tasks, surfacing helpful insights, and improving the quality of both human and AI-assisted support.
Depending on the capability, Forethought can:
- Identify customer intent by analyzing ticket content to understand what the customer needs.
- Automate support tasks by answering common questions, routing tickets, or suggesting next steps.
- Assist agents by drafting replies that allow agents to respond more quickly and efficiently.
- Surface insights by providing reporting and analysis to help teams improve support operations.
- Review quality by supporting QA workflows to help teams measure and improve service quality.
Together, these capabilities help support teams work more efficiently and deliver a better customer experience.
How does Forethought work?
Forethought uses AI to analyze incoming support requests and support content, then applies that intelligence to different parts of the support workflow.
Forethought includes the following capabilities:
- Solve: Uses agentic AI to automate answers to common customer questions and deliver end-to-end resolutions across support channels. Powered by autoflows, Solve goes beyond deflection to fully resolve both simple and complex customer inquiries, reducing costs and boosting satisfaction.
- Assist (Add-on): Acts as an AI copilot for your agents, helping them draft responses and work faster. Delivered as a browser extension, Assist analyzes tickets in real time, recommends workflows and knowledge articles, and generates accurate, brand-aligned responses. Powered by agentic AI, it guides agents through cases while providing insights into usage and performance for continuous improvement.
- Triage (Add-on): Routes and prioritizes tickets intelligently using agentic AI that analyzes each ticket, interprets intent and urgency, and routes it to the right team or queue, automatically and instantly. By automating ticket classification, Triage frees your team from tedious manual work so they can focus on delivering excellent support.
- Agent QA (Add-on): Supports quality assurance review for human agents by automatically analyzing your support agents' responses using customizable, AI-powered rubrics. Supervisors can consistently measure agent performance, like resolution quality, grammar, and empathy, without relying on manual reviews.
- AI QA (Add-on): Evaluates AI-driven support experiences by continuously evaluating AI and customer interactions using customizable rubrics. AI QA turns every conversation into actionable information for your support experience.
- Integrations: Built-in integrations offer a quick way to connect various knowledge sources to Forethought. Set up connections that surface supported information in Solve's widget (chat) and email channels, as well as Assist.
- Discover (Add-on): Provides insights into support trends and performance, turning every conversation, ticket, and agent interaction into actionable insights. From detecting content gaps to automating workflows and tracking performance trends, Discover helps you continuously improve your support operations with AI-powered recommendations.
- Analytics API (Add-on): Retrieves conversation-level analytics for chat, voice, API, Slack, and other supported channel interactions. This data enables you to analyze engagement and deflection rates, intent performance, CSAT and resolution outcomes, handoff patterns, context variable usage, and AI QA rubric scores.
- Multibrand (Add-on): Allows you to manage up to 20 brands with custom experiences.
Why should I use Forethought?
Forethought AI agents helps support teams work more efficiently and deliver better customer experiences. Even if you do not currently use the Zendesk platform, Forethought can help your support team:
- Respond faster: Automate common questions and improve routing to reduce delays.
- Improve consistency: Suggested responses and QA tools help maintain a consistent support experience.
- Reduce manual and repetitive work: Agents spend less time on routine tasks and more time on complex issues. Intelligent routing and automated answers lighten the load on agents. Automation and AI assistance reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
- Gain better visibility into support operations: Analytics and review tools help leaders understand trends, gaps, and opportunities. QA tools help teams understand trends and find opportunities to improve.
- Scale support more easily: As ticket volume grows, AI helps teams keep up without sacrificing service quality.
How can I get started with Forethought?
Forethought plans are available for purchase for any customer. Contact Zendesk Sales.