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Question

Custom Agent Not Working

  • June 12, 2026
  • 6 replies
  • 81 views
Fiona11

We just got access to the full Zendesk AI and I’m playing around and seeing what it can do. 

I would like to have a custom agent that checks all incoming tickets and sets the priority as urgent if the content mentions needing to cancel an order or update an address for an order. Before I get to that, I made a simple test agent to test the mechanics but I can’t get even that to work. 

 

My instructions are: “If a ticket is created and the end user mentions pink elephants in the comments, assign the ticket to an Admin.” and I made a ticket mentioning pink elephants but the ticket is just sitting there. Do I need to do something else to the custom agent? What am I missing? 

 

Thanks!

    6 replies

    Fiona11
    • Fiona11
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • June 18, 2026

    Update:

    I just found out that the reason it doesn’t work is because I don’t have the copilot add on. Although I can see and interact with (and spent a few hours trying to configure) the feature, my account doesn’t actually have the access it needs to make this work. Very misleading!

    B

    Hey Fiona!  You shouldn’t need the Copilot add on to access and use Custom Agents.  If you go to the admin console, navigate to Agent Builder under AI -- this is where you create custom agents.  Please let me know if this resolves your issue.  Thank you!

    Fiona11
    • Fiona11
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • June 24, 2026

    Hi ​@Brett Schuenemann I was told by a Zendesk employee in a ticket that Custom Agents is part of Copilot. I am able to access builder and play around with it, even though I don’t have a Copilot AddOn but it won’t be possible to activate it without the AddOn. That’s what I was told in a ticket with Zendesk about this issue. It’s odd as this isn’t stated anywhere in their documentation!

    Y
    • Yaniv11
    • Newcomer
    • July 8, 2026

    ​@Brett Schuenemann 

    I wonder if ​@Fiona11 is right. 
    Here is a simple custom agent instruction I created, but when I sent an email asking to “extend my license,” the agent did not perform an action on the ticket. 
     

     

     

    B

    ​@Yaniv11 Have you added this custom agent to an Action Flow running on ticket creation?  The way Custom Agents are invoked today are through Action Flows.

    Y
    • Yaniv11
    • Newcomer
    • July 9, 2026

    Hi ​@Brett Schuenemann 
    I added it to an action flow that for ticket creation, adds a tag p000 > hands off to custom agent > adds tag p001:

     


    The custom agent ran 4 times:
     

    A ticket requesting to “Extend the license” was updated with both tags, but the custom agent did not add the comment or add the cai_license_extension tag as it should have.

     

     

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