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Zendesk has shipped three generations of conversational AI. Most confusion about it comes from reading about the wrong one.
First: bot builder
A flow chart. You drew the conversation: if the customer says this, reply that, then offer these three buttons. Predictable, and it only ever handled what somebody had drawn.
Second: essential AI agents
The same flows with some understanding of intent bolted on. Better at recognising what somebody meant, still fundamentally a decision tree you maintained.
Third: AI agents
The current generation. It answers from your knowledge base in its own words, follows procedures you have written in plain language, and can carry out actions against other systems.
You describe what should happen rather than drawing every path.
Why this matters when you read
Search results, forum posts and older documentation cover all three without always saying which. Instructions that tell you to open a flow builder and drag nodes are describing the first generation, and following them in the current one means looking for controls that are not there.
How to tell what you are looking at
If the instructions are about drawing a flow, it is legacy. If they are about writing what the agent should do in sentences, it is current.
If you are still on an older one
It keeps working, and it will not gain anything new. Moving is a rebuild rather than an upgrade, because the thing you maintain changes from a diagram to written instructions. Worth planning rather than doing in an afternoon.
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