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California-based Zendesk’s generative AI game to reshape customer service began more than a year ago. Zendesk AI, the company’s core CX product, offers various LLMs-driven customer service tools and ticketing systems.
Brands across the globe use it to manage customer interactions, enhance call centre efficiency, help agents handle inquiries, prioritise tickets, and deliver a smooth customer support experience.
More recently, the company launched autonomous AI agents, workflow automation, agent copilot, and AI-powered Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) and Quality Assurance (QA) tools in Zendesk AI.
In a detailed interaction with AIM, Vasudeva Rao Munnaluri, RVP for India and SAARC at Zendesk, explained that with generative AI in its bucket and nearly two billion dollars in revenue attributable to the adoption of its Zendesk AI and expansion with customers, the SaaS giant plans to reach $3 billion dollars by 2027.
The Role of Data
“We process around eight billion requests daily and four million agents and admins leveraging our systems. This data fuels our AI missions,” said Munnaluri.
Its proprietary data set, consisting of ticket data accumulated over years from thousands of customers, forms the backbone of its AI models. These models are designed to detect intent, sentiment, and emotions, enabling efficient ticket routing and knowledge base provision.
“This data-driven approach helps automate workflows, enhancing both agent productivity and customer satisfaction,” added Munnaluri. The company aims to automate 50% of customer interactions through autonomous agents.
Another important element of the company’s generative AI strategy is its partnership with AWS and Anthropic. The collaboration was announced last month at its flagship event Relate in San Francisco and Las Vegas.
Through AWS, Zendesk leverages Amazon Bedrock to scale generative AI applications, incorporating Anthropic’s leading model Claude 3. “We are able to offer faster, more efficient, and accurate AI features, thanks to our partnerships with AWS and Anthropic,” Munnaluri said.
Zendesk’s primary competitors include Freshworks, Zoho, and Oracle.
Expanding Footprint in India
With over 80 employees and a comprehensive functional representation, the India team continues to contribute significantly to the company’s global operations. It has over 160,000 customers in 160 countries. Some of its prominent customers in India are Cars24, Dream11, Plum, Unacademy and more.
The company began operations in India in 2016, and the country has since become a crucial market within the APAC region. “India is a key market for Zendesk and one of the largest in the APAC region. We have seen continuous growth and plan to expand further,” Munnaluri emphasised.
Although expansion in India is a priority due to the market’s dynamic nature, Munnaluri expressed that one of the major challenges in this country is the slow adoption of AI, with less than 15% of Indian businesses having an enterprise AI strategy as per the Zendesk CX Trends Report 2024.
“Well, four out of five of my conversations in India are about AI, but I think, it’s still not caught into the overall strategy there. Over 50% still need adequate data at the view level. When you say data, it needs to be organised in a way that you have the taxonomy or the metadata available and ready to be understood by the AI models,” he added.
Institutional inertia or resistance to change towards AI adoption further complicates the matter. Additionally, Indian customers are demanding more personalised and faster services, which requires solid investment in AI and data management.
However, to make the generative AI products more diverse and accessible to a wider population of the country, it recently acquired Berlin-based AI startup Ultimate, which supports 109 languages globally, including over 13 Indian languages such as Marathi, Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Odia, and Bengali.
This acquisition is in an effort to improve Zendesk’s ability to support Indian languages and break the barriers in customer service.
[Update: 6th June 2024 13:32 | Previously, the headline mentioned that Zendesk Expects $3 Bn in revenue by 2027 with AI. However, the company requested that it be attributable to the adoption of its core AI CX product and expansion with tenured customers. The headline has now been updated to show that the company is not solely crediting this revenue projection to AI.]
