Earlier in the year Zendesk bought Australian startup Local Measure. Zendesk has used the acquisition to expand and strengthen its position in the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) market, particularly for larger, more complex enterprise environments.
While many industry analysts suggest a large segment of the market is still on-premise, Zendesk’s research indicates that the majority of organisations have already moved to the cloud. Also, those remaining on-premise are not adopting first-generation cloud CCaaS solutions. Instead, they are Jumping straight to AI-infused solutions like agentic and AI co-pilots.
This is driven by the fact that many legacy CCaaS vendors have architectures that are no longer modern and have to ‘bolt on’ third-party AI solutions. Zendesk’s strategy is to have AI infused across their entire Resolution platform, making every product benefit from a foundational AI layer.
Jonathan Barouch, Vice President and General Manager of Zendesk Contact Centre (former CEO and founder of Local Measure), comments, “What’s really interesting is how customers are moving to AI. The on-premise customers aren’t bothering with first-generation cloud CCaaS. They are jumping straight to AI-infused solutions like agentic and AI co-pilots.The reality is, many legacy CCaaS vendors have to ‘bolt on’ AI. Our strategy is different: we have AI infused across the entire platform, making sure every single product benefits from that foundational AI layer.”
Recent AI announcements
Zendesk has announced several advancements in its AI innovation strategy and Resolution Platform at its recent AI Summit. These developments are intended to enhance the platform’s ability to manage complex, high-volume customer and employee interactions, offering a complete, AI-first solution for Customer Service, Employee Service, and Contact Centre teams.This includes:
- The general availability of Zendesk Copilot for the contact centre, offering summarisation, intelligent triage, and field population.
- The upcoming launch of Voice AI Agents, designed for high-fidelity execution of procedures and seamless escalation to human agents, evolving the human worker into a ‘supervisor’.
Barouch noted that joining Zendesk immediately provided the Local Measure team with the resources to expand their solution and integrate capabilities that were previously on their roadmap, “AI Summit announcements, like Knowledge Connectors and Knowledge Builder, are perfect examples. These were innovations our smaller team wanted to build for the longest time, but we just never had the resources. Now, we get all that innovation essentially for free.”
“The key benefit of joining Zendesk is the scale of innovation. We went from having a wish list of products to instantly gaining access to a massive product portfolio and an array of resources. Now, we’re integrated, giving Zendesk a truly compelling and differentiated solution that straddles both the CX and CCaaS industries.”
Some of the advancements Zendesk has incorporated into their platform include::
- Autonomous voice AI agents: Introduction of highly autonomous agents to deliver seamless, intelligent customer conversations.
- Contact center enhancements: Integration of Video Calling and Screen Sharing capabilities to enable real-time collaboration within the Zendesk Contact Center.
- Employee service optimisation: Implementation of IT Asset Management for full device visibility, ensuring faster resolution of employee issues.
- Productivity tools: New capabilities like Admin Copilot, Knowledge Builder, Action Builder, and App Builder designed to boost team productivity.
- Advanced Analytics: Integration of next-generation analytics from the HyperArc acquisition to deliver deeper, unparalleled insights.
Tom Eggemeier, Zendesk CEO, highlighted , “Today’s customers want more than just quick responses—they expect issues fully resolved. While many speak of AI as a distant promise, Zendesk is distinguished by our tangible, realised products already reshaping service today… We’re the AI service provider of choice for more companies than any other, and we’re committed to helping customers cut through complexity and create lasting impact.”
Kellie Hackney, Regional Vice President, Zendesk Australia and New Zealand, addressed local market demand, “Australian businesses understand that AI is no longer optional, with nine in ten leaders telling us it’s essential for their future success. Zendesk’s latest advancements put the power of AI to work across the entire Resolution Platform to meet this urgent demand. This isn’t just about efficiency, it’s about helping companies of all sizes automate workflows, anticipate customer needs, and deliver resolutions at scale.”
The promise of proactive engagement
The shift from a reactive service model to a proactive customer engagement model is the ultimate promise of AI. The end goal is for a customer to never have to pick up the phone. “Proactive experiences—like a telco messaging a customer about an outage or an airline informing them of a flight disruption—not only drive loyalty but massively drive down contacts and costs for the organisation”, says Barouch.
To move from reacting to anticipating, organisations need deep, real-time access to customer and operational data. “We recently acquired Hyper-Arc, an AI analytics platform. It’s super cool because a non-technical user can type in natural language, asking things like, ‘Why did call volume spike last Wednesday between 10 and 2?’ and it will instantly generate the insights and reports.”
The platform then instantly generates the necessary insights and reports, allowing the business to understand the root cause of the spike and take preventative action. This ability to quickly translate natural language questions into actionable intelligence is key to identifying systemic issues and delivering truly proactive service at scale. The ultimate objective is for companies to anticipate and resolve issues before a customer ever needs to pick up the phone.
Global nuances – The APAC language challenge
While the Asian Pacific region (APAC) is poised for a great deal of CCaaS and Voice AI uptake, a major challenge is catering to the vast variety of individual languages (e.g., Indonesian, Malaysian, Korean, and Japanese). “We’re achieving high accuracy by prompting the LLM with specific instructions, like ‘Keep a formal tone, but use Canadian French colloquialisms.’ That localisation ability is absolutely key to our global scaling.”
“Our ultimate goal is for customers to feel that voice is a first-party channel and a first-party experience. We’re reinventing the Zendesk workspace, which was built for asynchronous conversations, to thrive in the highly synchronous world of voice.”
“This means implementing real-time context updates in the agent workspace. As a customer speaks, the system is dynamically changing the next best action, essentially adapting the workspace based on what’s happening live on the call.”
Zendesk’s acquisition of Local Measure and the subsequent advancements announced at its AI Summit mark a decisive move to claim leadership in the modern CCaaS market. The company is strategically positioning itself not just as a traditional customer experience (CX) vendor, but as an AI-first platform ready for the next generation of service.
The core of this strategy is the recognition that the market is rapidly bypassing legacy cloud solutions. As Jonathan Barouch notes, customers are “jumping straight to AI-infused solutions” because they no longer accept the limitations of older architectures. Zendesk directly addresses this shift by infusing AI across its entire platform, rather than bolting on third-party solutions.