The News: Zendesk announced it will acquire Ultimate, a provider of service automation, to help equip its AI agents with enhanced intelligence that enables them to take proactive actions to solve problems, thereby complementing human expertise. Through the acquisition, Zendesk’s agents will be able to leverage any knowledge source to resolve sophisticated use cases. You can read the press release discussing these announcements in detail on the Zendesk website.
Zendesk to Acquire Service Automation Provider Ultimate
Analyst Take: Zendesk continues to improve its offering through the acquisition of former integration partners. In February, the company announced it was buying Klaus, a provider of workforce engagement management (WEM) and adds AI-powered quality assurance (QA). Now, Zendesk has announced the acquisition of Ultimate, a customer support automation platform that offers its UltimateGPT technology that is designed to automate up to 60% of support requests.
According to the company, UltimateGPT is designed to leverage any knowledge source and offer full customization to resolve sophisticated use cases, and the platform itself is capable of integrating with any back-end system. The combination of Zendesk’s existing AI and automation tools with Ultimate’s technology is designed to provide customers with greater flexibility and control to support their customers via fully autonomous agents, through workflow automation, and human agents supported via these tools. Ultimate aims to automate 60% of support requests, but many of its customers have seen even greater success, automating up to 80% of support requests.
Leveraging the Power of GPT-4 to Enhance Conversations
A key stumbling block for many organizations around implementing bots is that they do not look or feel natural to customers, particularly mid-market and other companies that have built their business and reputation for providing personalized and relevant service during every interaction. The chatbots that have been previously deployed often featured clunky attempts at trying to mimic human interactions, such as displaying empathy, or simply were not able to understand nuance when trying to answer questions.
Ultimate’s generative AI technology leverages an upgraded AI engine that uses GPT-4, to provide more natural-sounding interactions between bots and customers. This should help to smooth the flow of interactions between bots and customers, which are often a key source of friction. Further, the company’s UltimateGPT service is grounded in the customer’s existing help center resources to limit hallucination. It is designed to quickly find the correct answer, summarize it, and then serve it up to the customer.
Enhancing Connections through Bot Personas
Another interesting aspect of Ultimate’s technology is its control over Bot Personas, which let organizations define the identity and tone of a bot. The identity control is designed to let administrators name a bot and add a description so that there is no confusion as to the bot’s identity or its key function or domain.
Even more interesting is the tone of voice settings, which control the type of language a bot can use when responding to customers and users. This tool permits independent control of both the style of responses and the length of responses, enabling organizations to create a more natural and human-like bot for more casual types of products, services, or users, and a more formal style for more complex or regulated use cases and products.
The bot is designed, by default, to answer queries only with information contained in the Knowledge Base, which is the safest and most reliable way to prevent hallucination. The support pages for Ultimate AI’s Tone of Voice settings indicate that it is possible to “allow the bot to answer with knowledge that doesn’t exist in the knowledge base. By default this is disabled but if you have some less serious use case for your bot then you might want to consider allowing this to make the bot more fun.”
To me, there should be a massive bundle of caution tape wrapped around this option. Given the very public snafus around chatbots going wild, I question whether this should remain as an option, and expect Zendesk may take a close look at this function.
Iterative Knowledge Provides More Contextually Relevant Responses
Finally, it is worth looking at the recent technological update provided by Ultimate back in January, which noted that “UltimateGPT can now take the latest user message and generate a new one that contains any relevant parts of the earlier conversation context which leads to more understood messages. Defining a Custom Question will overwrite the visitor’s last message, allowing you to provide contextually relevant answers.”
These are welcome functional additions to a chatbot’s capability set, as a core frustration for most end customers is when a bot cannot process or understand the ideas of recency and relevancy within a conversation. Incorporating more human-like capabilities—provided they work accurately and consistently—should help instill more confidence in the technology for organizations that seek to automate a greater number of more complex interactions.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Other Insights from The Futurum Group:
Zendesk Reveals Improvements to Tymedesk Workforce Management Solution
Zendesk to Acquire AI-Driven Quality Management Platform Klaus
Zendesk AI Enhances AI Tools for Bots and Agent-Driven Interactions
Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
