Companies that use Zendesk AI

What this captures, and what it doesn't

This dataset identifies companies using Zendesk Advanced AI on their public-facing messenger widgets. Advanced AI is Zendesk's premium LLM-powered conversational tier, built on the Ultimate acquisition that Zendesk closed in 2024. It handles full conversational resolution - answering questions, taking actions, and only escalating to a human when needed.

Advanced AI is a paid add-on rather than a feature bundled into any Zendesk Suite plan. Companies that have it deployed have made an active, separate investment in conversational AI on top of their existing Zendesk subscription. This distinguishes them from the much larger pool of Zendesk customers who use only the standard ticketing and knowledge base.

This methodology does not capture:

• Zendesk customers using only the agent workspace, tickets, or knowledge base without the public messenger widget enabled - those don't surface AI signals in our probe.

Because Advanced AI requires a paid add-on on top of an existing Suite plan, this dataset skews toward larger Zendesk customers with active CX investment - retailers, B2B SaaS, financial services, and other categories where deflecting support volume directly impacts cost structure.

How we detect it

Zendesk's messenger widget loads a configuration bundle from ekr.zdassets.com/compose/{key}, where the key is embedded in the customer's site as part of the Zendesk Web Widget snippet. From that bundle we resolve the customer's Zendesk subdomain (e.g. libertylondon.zendesk.com), which is the entry point for everything downstream.

From the subdomain we fetch /embeddable/config to retrieve the messenger's appId and integrationId. These two identifiers let us initialize a real anonymous visitor session against Zendesk's Smooch-based messaging API at /sc/sdk/v2/apps/{appId}/appusers, the same endpoint the browser widget hits when a visitor opens the chat. The response returns a session token and a Base64-encoded auth header we use for the rest of the probe.

With an authenticated session, we query /sc/sdk/v2/apps/{appId}/appusers/{userId}/conversations and inspect the messages that come back. Every Zendesk message includes a source field identifying the system that produced it - human agents show as business, internal automation as system, and AI tiers as their specific provider IDs:

"source": {
  "type": "ultimate"
}

A source.type of ultimate is the unambiguous signal for Advanced AI. The value comes directly from the underlying Ultimate platform that powers the tier, and it appears in any conversation where the AI has handled a message. No other Zendesk product or configuration produces this value, so a match is a confirmed Advanced AI deployment with no further verification needed.

We run this probe across the most popular domains belonging to roughly 3 million companies, ranked by headcount as reported on their LinkedIn company profiles.