Announced on Rollout on
November 17, 2025 November 17, 2025
This announcement applies to AI agents - Essential and legacy AI agent functionality.

We’re expanding how AI agents access and use knowledge sources to generate accurate, helpful replies for your customers. In addition to Zendesk help center articles, AI agents can now draw from external knowledge sources managed in Knowledge or the Federated Search API.

This announcement answers the following questions:

  • What’s changing?
  • Why is Zendesk making this change?
  • What do I need to do?

What’s changing?

Until now, AI agents could reference only Zendesk help center articles as a knowledge source. With this update, you can now add and use external content stored in Knowledge alongside your help center content.

These external content sources includes:

  • Confluence sites and spaces
  • Web-crawled content from public or authenticated websites
  • Other external records ingested through the Federated Search API

Once added to Knowledge or through the API, these sources can be used by your AI agents to create AI-generated answers in response to customer questions.

Why is Zendesk making this change?

We know your knowledge isn’t confined to one place. Valuable content often lives across multiple systems, apps, and internal pages. For AI agents to deliver consistent, high-quality responses, they need access to all the content your teams rely on, not just what’s in your Zendesk help center.

By enabling AI agents to use a broader set of knowledge sources, we aim to help you:

  • Deliver consistent, trustworthy AI-generated replies
  • Drive more automated resolutions
  • Unlock greater value from the knowledge you already have

What do I need to do?

If you’d like your AI agents to use external content sources when generating responses:

  1. Add your external content to Knowledge using a web crawler, Confluence connection, or the Federated Search API.
  2. Connect an external content source to your AI agent so it can use the information to generate answers for customers.

Once you publish these changes, AI agents will automatically incorporate these sources when responding to customer requests.

If you have feedback or questions related to this announcement, visit our community forum where we collect and manage customer product feedback. For general assistance with your Zendesk products, contact Zendesk customer support.

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