Zendesk CEO: AI Agents Could Reshape Customer Service

Editor's note: This is AI Impact, Newsweek's weekly newsletter where each week, we will explore how business leaders are unlocking real value through artificial intelligence.

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As always, thanks for joining me.

AI transformation gets harder when new technology has to work around established systems, processes and ways of working. That’s what we’ll dig into next Wednesday, Oct. 21, at 2 p.m. ET, in “Overcoming Barriers to AI Transformation in Legacy Industries,” with senior leaders from Yahoo, EY, Microsoft and Qualcomm. One last reminder that there’s still time to register.

This week in AI Impact, I’m looking at a customer-service wrinkle I hadn’t thought much about before: when customers can hand the work of calling, messaging and following up to software of their own, the number of interactions businesses have to handle could climb fast.

Read on to learn more.

Signal Capture

Signals from the frontlines of AI adoption

Zendesk CEO: AI Agents Could Reshape Customer Service

Tom Eggemeier, CEO of customer service software company Zendesk, recently asked a personal AI agent to renegotiate his cable, streaming, internet and family mobile plans. Over four days, he said, it contacted the providers 37 times and saved him $3,150.

“What’s changing is the amount of interactions is just going to explode,” Eggemeier told Newsweek.

Before that, he had gone three or four years without contacting those companies. He now plans to have the agent check with them monthly.

Personal agents can repeatedly contact providers without requiring customers to spend the time doing it themselves. Automation may therefore reduce the effort required to handle each interaction while generating many more of them.

Eggemeier said Zendesk is seeing interaction volume rise among customers with the heaviest AI adoption. Automated service can operate around the clock and across languages that businesses may previously have supported only during limited hours, he said.

Handling that volume still requires companies to decide where each interaction should go. Businesses can examine their existing service activity and determine which issues should remain self-service, which AI can handle and where judgment or company policy still calls for a person, Eggemeier said.

Customer preference can change where a request lands.

“I think there’s certain situations where you want more empathy and you’re not looking for the quickest decision,” he said.

That preference can also change once an interaction begins.

“On the other hand, if I’m getting in a kind of circle loop with an AI agent and I’m not getting it solved, I want the ability to go to a human being,” Eggemeier said.

Executives also need to decide whether increased automation is actually producing better service, rather than judging it only by how much work the technology handles.

“If you’re getting higher resolution rates, but lower satisfaction, that is gonna impact your business in the future,” he said.

The measure of success can vary by interaction. One may be judged by whether an issue is resolved, while another could be measured by money collected or a sale. Eggemeier said CEOs should consider those outcomes alongside customer satisfaction over time.

The front door to customer service may also move outside the company itself. People could increasingly seek help through personal agents or interfaces such as ChatGPT and Claude instead of visiting a company’s website or opening its support tools directly, Eggemeier said.

Service moving into third-party AI interfaces could reduce traffic to companies’ own websites and human-to-human contact. It also leaves businesses with a new challenge: preserving their own information and customer experience when another AI system sits between them and the customer.

Eggemeier expects those outside interfaces to become a much bigger part of how customers interact with companies.

“I don’t think closed ecosystems are gonna work that well,” he said.

Upcoming Webinars

Overcoming Barriers to AI Transformation in Legacy Industries

AI investment is accelerating, and long-established companies are finding ways to bring the technology into organizations shaped by years of customer relationships, complex operations, critical systems and regulatory responsibilities. The challenge is turning promising pilots into lasting business results without disrupting the strengths that have made those companies successful.

In an upcoming Newsweek AI webinar presented by Cognizant, Gabriel Snyder, Newsweek’s executive editor, enterprise, will moderate a discussion titled “Overcoming Barriers to AI Transformation in Legacy Industries.”

The conversation will delve into how established organizations are connecting AI to existing systems and workflows, clarifying ownership and governance and aligning technology investments with people, processes and measurable business outcomes.

Matt Sanchez, chief operating officer at Yahoo, Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning, edge solutions and data center at Qualcomm and Katy George, corporate vice president of workforce transformation at Microsoft and and Rodrigo Madanes, global next frontier technology and AI leader at EY will join the conversation.

What Enterprise AI Looks Like When It Works

On November 4, Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar, host of Newsweek’s “AI Impact Forum,” will sit down with Firdaus Bhathena, executive vice president and chief technology and transformation officer at S&P Global, to discuss how large companies are turning advances in AI into business results, and why trusted, differentiated data is becoming increasingly important.

Drawing on Bhathena’s experience at S&P Global, FIS Global and CVS Health, the conversation will examine how organizations make data governed and reusable, redesign workflows around new capabilities and balance speed with trust, security and resilience.

They’ll also explore how leaders can keep technology investments focused on customer problems and identify where genuine competitive advantage can emerge.

Join the live discussion Wednesday, November 4, at 11 a.m. ET. Register for free.

The AI Election: How Artificial Intelligence Shaped the 2026 Midterms

What will the 2026 midterms tell us about the emerging politics of AI?

One week after Election Day, Gabriel Snyder, Newsweek’s executive editor, enterprise, will moderate a discussion with policy experts and Washington insiders examining the midterm results through the lens of artificial intelligence.

The panel will feature Nathaniel Persily, professor of law at Stanford Law School; Brent Buchanan, founder and CEO of Cygnal; and Nick Penniman, founder and CEO of Issue One.

Using Newsweek’s AI Policy Scorecard as a starting point, the panel will explore where AI policy became a campaign issue, how positions crossed traditional party lines and how debates over regulation, data centers, jobs, privacy and national security played out in individual races.

The conversation will also look at how campaigns and outside groups approached these issues, including the role of industry spending, and what the results could mean for the policy fights ahead.

Register and join the live discussion on November 10.

Enterprise AI in the Physical World: Navigating the Supply Chain’s Messy Frontier

Warehouses, factories and transportation networks put enterprise AI to a different kind of test: digital decisions have immediate consequences in the physical world.

Duncan Angove, chief executive officer of Blue Yonder, joins Dr. Ranjit Tinaikar, host of Newsweek’s “AI Impact Forum,” on November 19 for a conversation about bringing increasingly autonomous systems into complex supply chain operations.

The discussion will cover the role of specialized models, the expertise companies need to preserve as more decisions become automated and whether the economics of enterprise technology could move toward measurable business outcomes such as productivity, operating costs and the movement of goods.

Register to join the live discussion Thursday, November 19, at 12:30 p.m. ET.

Prompt Injection

What’s one recent insight you’ve learned about AI?

“The biggest insight I keep coming back to is how severely organizations are underestimating the organizational change management and organizational design work that comes with AI. This is not a one-time transition. Even straightforward AI applications do not stay static. The feature set evolves. The user experience evolves. That means continuous training, feedback loops, and workflow updates become permanent operational requirements, not implementation tasks you close out.

But the deeper shift is at the organizational level. The legacy operating models inside IT, Risk, and Governance were not built for this. As AI programs mature, those team structures need to change. New roles, new accountability frameworks, new ways of thinking about who owns what. That redesign work sits at the intersection of HR, executive leadership, and every functional leader in the building.

The urgency is real. Organizations that are planning for AI from a technology and risk perspective alone are only solving part of the problem. The operating model conversation needs to happen in parallel. If it doesn't, governance becomes reactive and adoption stalls. You can have the right policies and the wrong structure and still fail.”

Have your own lesson to share? Email me at: a.mills@newsweek.com

Run Log

AI use case of the week

WestCX AI Carries Patient Context From Message to Call

The more patients hear from a health care organization, the more opportunities they have to call it back. Appointment reminders, refill prompts and other outreach can create additional work when staff have to piece together the context behind each response.

Sam Meckey, president of WestCX, a customer-engagement technology company serving regulated industries, said the company is using AI to keep those interactions connected as patients move between messages and calls.

WestCX combines patient information, communication history and the workflow behind a request. Its AI can identify why someone is reaching out, respond to common needs and carry information from an earlier interaction into the next one, rather than leaving staff to reconstruct the exchange.

Meckey said health care organizations using the platform have reduced call volume by 40 percent and kept up to 62 percent of inbound calls from being routed to front-desk staff.

“What those numbers really create is time,” Meckey said.

He said staff can spend more of it on patients who need human support instead of manually connecting conversations across systems.

When AI carries the history of an interaction forward, a reply, callback or follow-up is less likely to become another task someone has to reconstruct by hand.

Have an interesting AI use case to share with me? Email me at: a.mills@newsweek.com

Context Window

■ OpenAI and Meta warned a federal judicial panel that increasingly sophisticated AI-generated audio and video could make authenticating courtroom evidence more difficult, as judges consider whether existing evidence rules are sufficient. [Reuters]

■ An MIT capstone project developed a local AI system that compares maritime contracts against approved templates, flags changed obligations and potential demurrage exposure, and keeps sensitive agreement data off the cloud. [Supply Chain Management Review]

■ The U.S. Senate is preparing to give staffers access to Anthropic’s Claude, expanding the suite of AI tools available to thousands of aides for official work. [Bloomberg Government]

■ TSMC is struggling to keep up with demand for advanced chip capacity from Nvidia, AMD and major cloud companies, with analysts warning that manufacturing constraints could limit the AI industry’s ability to scale. [CNBC]

■ A Wharton and GBK Collective study found that 67 percent of enterprise leaders whose departments had fully embedded AI, adopted agents and significantly redesigned workflows reported strongly positive ROI, compared with 19 percent of those that had not. [Knowledge at Wharton]

Transfer Protocol

Tracking executive moves across the AI landscape

Joe Nipko, who led AI at Form Bio, has joined Planview as chief data scientist, helping advance its AI capabilities as the company builds tools to help enterprises allocate people, money and time more effectively.

Gabriel Rodriguez, former senior vice president of technology at LPL Financial, has been named chief technology officer at Choreo, building its technology platform and using AI to expand advisor capacity across the firm’s tax and wealth management business.

Tigran Khrimian, former chief technology engineering officer at FINRA, has joined Rimes as chief technology officer, leading global technology strategy, platform transformation, engineering and AI enablement as it expands data and intelligence capabilities for capital markets.

Cayetano Gea-Carrasco, who led enterprise AI transformation and the global data and analytics organization at BBVA, is joining Wells Fargo as head of AI and data for Consumer Banking and Lending, overseeing AI use cases, data modernization and responsible deployment.

Shivani Stumpf, bringing senior leadership experience from PowerSchool and Hoonuit, has joined Xplor Technologies as chief AI officer, leading its enterprise AI strategy and bringing AI-native capabilities into its vertical software products.

Know someone on the move in AI? Send job change info to a.mills@newsweek.com

Magic Moment

What’s the most fun or unexpected way you’ve used AI lately?

“The most unexpected way I’ve used AI recently was as a thinking partner while developing an article that was just published. I initially expected to use it as a faster word processor, but instead it challenged broad assumptions I was making about payer architecture by surfacing specific scenarios I hadn’t fully tested, questions like, ‘What breaks if you’re wrong about the unified state?’ and ‘Why wouldn’t a provider just call the call center anyway?’ The piece ended up much sharper because of that back-and-forth, and it helped uncover a couple of arguments that wouldn’t have held up under real scrutiny.

It stood out because it was a reminder that AI’s most useful role isn’t just to ‘do work faster,’ but to be the colleague who asks the question I’m avoiding. Once I started using it that way, my whole approach shifted. I open it not when I need output, but when I want a second brain that won’t be polite about my weak points.”

Experience some AI magic? Tell us about it at a.mills@newsweek.com

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