Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Admin |
You pay when the AI agent resolves something on its own. What counts, what does not, and the questions to settle first.
The principle
Zendesk describes it plainly: you pay for requests the AI agent resolved successfully, without escalation to a human agent. A conversation the AI could not handle, which goes to a person, is not an automated resolution.
That alignment is the appeal. You are not paying for a bot to fail politely.
Where it gets less simple
The interesting cases are at the edges, and they are the ones to establish before you switch anything on.
- A customer who comes back an hour later about the same thing. One resolution or two?
- A conversation that ends without escalating because the customer gave up rather than because they were helped.
- A follow-up ticket arising from something the AI answered.
The second one now has half an answer. Zendesk grades every conversation into a tier, and only a Verified resolution draws on your allowance: a conversation that fails the verification becomes a Contained resolution and costs you nothing. What that does not settle is the polite give-up, because a conversation that goes quiet can still pass verification and be charged.
Every Suite and Support plan comes with a resolution allowance included, sized by your plan and your number of agent seats, so charging starts where that allowance ends rather than at the first resolution. The exception is a Forethought AI agent plan, which carries no default allowance at all.
Zendesk publishes what that sizing is, per agent seat per month: on the Suites, $2 on Team, $5 on Growth and Professional and $10 on Enterprise and Enterprise Plus; on standalone Support it is $2 on every tier that offers it. Multiply by your seats and you have the budget you start the month with, which is the figure to hold your forecast against.
Two things to know about where you read it. The allowance dashboard itself sits with the account owner and billing admins, which on an account you buy through us means us, so ask and we will tell you where you stand. Your own admins have a separate usage dashboard, which is the one described below. And this only exists if your account is on the resolution allowance pricing model: if the dashboard is not in Admin Center at all, your account is priced another way and the numbers here do not apply.
None of these are trick questions, and Zendesk documents its definitions. They are worth reading rather than assuming, because they decide what your bill does as volume grows.
Decide what happens at the limit
This is the setting to make deliberately, because both answers cost you something.
- Allow overage. Past the allowance you pay per resolution. The AI agent keeps working and the bill keeps moving.
- Do not allow overage. The bill stops and so does the AI agent: its functionality pauses when the allowance runs out.
Raising the allowance itself is not a button on your side. Ask us and we arrange it. Ask before a busy month rather than during one.
Read that second one carefully before choosing it as the cautious option. It means that on a busy month your bot stops answering, and everything it was handling arrives at your agents instead, at the point in the month when they are already busiest.
Watch the number from the start
Automated resolutions are reportable. Put them on a dashboard from the first week, next to your ticket volume and your escalation rate, so you can see the three move together. A rising resolution count with a flat ticket volume means something different from a rising count with rising volume.
You can also have the account tell you. Under Account > Usage in Admin Center, Manage notifications sets which admins receive email about usage thresholds and about a forecast that points past your allowance. Turning that on in week one is cheaper than reading it off a dashboard somebody stopped opening, and a forecast warning arrives while there is still a month to act in.
The good problem
If your AI agent works, this line grows. That is what success looks like, and it still has to be budgeted for. Teams that model AI as a saving and not as a cost are the ones surprised in month four.
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