Introducing Advanced Action Flows for Zendesk Employee Service AI Agents

When employees reach out for help, they don’t want another place to search for answers. They just want something to get done. A new laptop. Access to software. Onboard a new hire.

These sound like routine requests. But getting them done can mean checking policies, finding the right system, waiting for an approval, updating a record, and following up with another team.

And the queue keeps growing. HDI found that 46% of IT support professionals surveyed saw ticket volume rise over the prior year. But while 95% of IT professionals in Ivanti’s survey said automation is necessary for efficiency, fewer than half of organizations reported automating service desk tickets or employee onboarding.  As a result, most employees wait, and skilled IT people spend the majority of their time coordinating routine tasks  across systems. It’s a nightmare.

We built Employee Service AI Agents to close that gap. They connect to knowledge sources, respect existing permissions, and let employees get help in the tools they already use. And now, you can combine these Agents with Advanced Action Flows to resolve complex requests across systems and teams. 

Build workflows with ease 

Traditional drag-and-drop workflow tools have worked well for straightforward, repeatable tasks. But as workflows have become more layered, building them has required a ton of manual configuration and technical research.

Advanced Action Flows helps teams move from intent to production-ready automation faster. Internal support teams can simply describe what they need in natural language, and Advanced Action Flows automatically identifies the Zendesk and third-party APIs required to automate the process.

This eliminates tedious manual configuration that drag-and-drop workflow builders require, so teams can spend less time building and more time designing the employee service experiences they need.

Get the flexibility you need

Employee requests rarely follow the same steps every time. Replacing a laptop can involve checking inventory, confirming what the employee is eligible for, getting approval, and arranging delivery. The steps can vary depending on the employee and what’s available.

Traditional drag-and-drop workflow tools typically follow the paths teams define in advance. That works well for routine requests, but it can break down when a request depends on context, information from another system, or takes an unexpected turn.

Advanced Action Flows gives teams more flexibility to automate this work. They can use set rules for routine steps and let AI handle parts that require context or a different path. Teams can coordinate work across systems and departments while keeping the approvals and safeguards they need. For example, a laptop replacement request can follow the standard path when an eligible device is available. If required information is missing or inventory is unavailable, Advanced Action Flows can take a different path, asking a follow-up question, routing the request to procurement, or sending it for human review.

Easily connect, set up and use

With one click, support teams can connect an Advanced Action Flow to an Employee Service AI Agent. Employees can ask for what they need in Slack, Microsoft Teams, or the Employee Help Center. The agent can then start the workflow and move any employee request through to the next step.

Get time back in your day

We didn’t build Employee Service AI Agents to give employees another place to look for answers. We built them to close the gap between asking for help and getting something done.

We’re excited about giving IT time back. A 2026 benchmark found that employees lose an average of 3 hours and 18 minutes of productive time per IT incident. Advanced Action Flows gives IT a way to tackle the work behind that lost time: automate eligible requests across systems, keep control of approvals, and measure the hours returned workflow by workflow. The goal is simple: fewer hours spent routing requests and chasing updates, and more time for the work only IT can do.