December 23, 2025
Zendesk Acquires Unleash, Moves Deeper Into AI-First Employee Service
Zendesk has acquired Unleash, an AI-powered enterprise search platform, to double down on internal employee service and AI-first support models. The deal brings generative AI search, permission-based retrieval, and deep collaboration tool integrations directly into Zendesk’s employee service offering.
The goal is to help employees get accurate answers faster, inside the tools they already use, without creating new security or governance risks.
Knowledge Search Made Easy
Employees often know the information exists somewhere, but finding it means searching across drives, wikis, chat threads, and ticketing systems, which creates frustration, slows work, and drives up internal support costs.
Zendesk’s acquisition of Unleash is designed to address this problem by connecting company knowledge across systems and making it accessible through AI, while still respecting strict data permissions. Instead of searching manually or opening a support ticket, employees can ask a question and receive an answer directly in their collaboration platform.
What Unleash Adds to Zendesk
Unleash brings enterprise search and retrieval technology that works across more than 70 content sources, including tools like Google Drive, Confluence, and SharePoint. The platform uses permission-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), meaning employees only see information they are authorised to access.
The technology also includes native AI knowledge agents built directly into Slack and Microsoft Teams. Employees can ask questions where they already work, receive instant answers, and escalate to a human expert if needed, without switching tools or repeating information.
A key part of the platform is its connector library, which enforces fine-grained access controls when users run a query, ensuring they receive only authorised data.
Zendesk plans to extend the same AI governance and workflow standards used in customer service to employee service. That means consistent security, privacy, and oversight across both internal and external support environments.
A Busy Autumn for Zendesk’s AI Strategy
Between October and December, Zendesk announced new partnerships and platform updates tied to AI, voice services, and contact centre technology. At AWS re:Invent, the company announced an expanded collaboration with Amazon Web Services to accelerate AI-powered contact centre modernisation and scale Zendesk Contact Centre globally. The partnership brings Amazon Connect voice services together with Zendesk’s AI, analytics, and digital channels in a more unified service environment.
Zendesk also rolled out major updates to its Resolution Platform at its AI Summit, adding voice AI and video support across customer and employee service. Its AI agents already handle a significant share of the nearly five billion issues resolved each year, using advanced language models and real-time data to manage multi-step problems.
