Zendesk has announced plans to acquire AI agent platform Forethought, in what it says would be the company’s largest deal in nearly 20 years.
The acquisition is designed to expand Zendesk’s AI agent offerings on its Resolution Platform, enabling them to work across multiple service channels and platforms.
Zendesk said it expects autonomous AI to handle more customer service interactions than humans this year, marking a structural shift in the way companies approach support.
Tom Eggemeier, Zendesk CEO, described the acquisition as a step toward “agentic service.”
“Forethought’s advanced capabilities perfectly align with our vision for agentic service. Together, we will be scaling self-improving AI that learns from every interaction. But technology is just the means. Resolution is our identity, and loyalty is the outcome.”
Zendesk AI agents already handle more than 80 percent of interactions end-to-end, with human and AI agents working together. The Resolution Learning Loop learns from each customer conversation without the need for manual retraining.
Zendesk’s Resolution Platform is designed to bring together channels, workflows and intelligence into a single system for managing customer interactions and employee service tools, helping teams handle higher volumes of requests while maintaining service quality and consistency.
Adding Forethought’s technology will allow Zendesk to extend this into fully self-learning AI agents that can generate and execute complex workflows across channels or platforms. In that way, each interaction will help to increase what the autonomous agents can resolve independently, allowing the platform to manage more complex workflows. That could include autonomous task execution across voice channels and enterprise systems where APIs may not exist.
By acquiring Forethought, Zendesk said it will accelerate its product roadmap by more than a year. The vendor’s customers will gain earlier access to expanded AI capabilities, a more unified experience, and improved support. New customers will be able to adopt the combined AI capabilities with no requirement to use the full Zendesk platform.
The acquisition is expected to close by the end of March, pending regulatory approvals.