deltastring weekly
Zendesk news and incisive views
This week
Rallycross at Lydden Hill was a proper treat last weekend. This week I'm hoping for calmer waters — planning to get the kayak on the Itchen if the weather behaves.
New piece on the site this week: Why should the Zendesk specialist even exist?. The short version: the "Zendesk specialist" role mostly exists because the admin panel is a maze, not because the work is inherently specialist. Nobody hires a Microsoft Word specialist to write contracts. I've been the Zendesk person in enough instances to know the frustration is universal, and the piece is really about what good tooling should free you up to do instead.
On a related note, I've been thinking seriously about local AI. We lean heavily on Claude across our tooling and that's a real dependency. If Anthropic disappeared or tripled their prices, we'd need a plan. So the question I'm turning over is whether we can augment or replace those Claude calls with a model we run ourselves.
The interesting bit isn't just resilience. A domain-specific fine-tune on Zendesk knowledge — triggers, macros, schemas, the relationships between them — could outperform a general-purpose model for our actual use cases. Everything stays on our hardware too, which changes the privacy conversation for clients who won't send their config to a third-party AI.
Hardware-wise, something like an Nvidia DGX on-prem would do it. And because we've already got solar and battery here, we could genuinely run it green — a story worth telling while the rest of the industry quietly burns through data centre capacity. Very much in the thinking-out-loud stage, but the kind of project that could shape what Deltastring looks like in a year.
We're still going to be at Zendesk Showcase London in June — signup page here. If you'll be around, let's grab a coffee.
From Deltastring
Deltastring CEO Rosie Elliott-Welch explains why we are determined to end our own roles, for the good of everyone.
What caught our attention
2 sources · analysis,industry · 2026-04-09
Analyst reports like this one always land with a bang. The "new operating model" framing is the bit worth sitting with though — it's not enough to bolt AI onto existing org charts and hope the numbers work. The teams that thrive will be the ones who rethink what roles, escalation paths and quality measures look like when a chunk of the first-touch work is automated. Very aligned with our concepts for Deltastring AI.
2 sources · industry · 2026-04-09
Worth reading alongside what I wrote up top. Flexibility in your AI stack isn't just a procurement box to tick — it's resilience. If one vendor's pricing or policy shifts tomorrow, can you pivot in weeks rather than quarters? Most teams can't, and that's a risk worth costing.
2 sources · industry · 2026-04-10
The honest answer is usually that the AI is bolted onto broken processes. You can't automate your way out of a support function that doesn't know what it's trying to achieve. Start with the process, then decide where the AI earns its keep — not the other way around.
1 source · industry · 2026-04-10
Here's the other side of the coin. When the narrative becomes "AI means headcount cuts", two things tend to happen: the remaining team gets stretched past the point where they can do good work, and customers feel the difference fast. AI should let your people do better work, not less work — the banks making that distinction will be the ones customers stick with.
1 source · features,ai,industry · 2026-04-09
Telecom customer support frustration is legendary and call volumes make any efficiency gain enormous. Voice-first agentic AI has a natural home here if the handoff to humans is designed properly — which, based on what I've heard from friends in the sector, is still the hard bit.
What we shipped
Zendesk configuration management
| Spreadsheet export now covers 26 object types total — properly structured exports for a significantly broader range of Beacon data, including 9 object types that had no schema at all until this week |
| Export test coverage expanded to catch regressions as the schema set grows |
| Settings and legal terms aligned with the recent tier restructure |
AI-native support platform
No shipped features to report this week — we've been heads-down training, testing and feeding the models with fresh data. Unglamorous work that never quite fits in a changelog, but it's where the quality actually comes from.
CX platform news, aggregated and analysed
| Newsletter email delivery hardened — admin preview endpoint, confirmation flow, and reliable test-send for checking drafts before they go out |
| Feed pipeline more robust — duplicate article handling, 403-resistant User-Agent for stricter feeds, and longer timeouts for slow upstream sources |
| Manual feed fetch trigger added so fresh content (like a just-published blog post) can be picked up on demand rather than waiting for the next scheduled cycle |
| Favicons and web app manifest added to the news site for proper branding across devices and when pinned to home screens |
| Google Analytics now tracks newsletter web-view engagement |
Worth your time
I've been working on the careers page at deltastring.com/careers and I'd genuinely value a few sets of fresh eyes on it before I do anything more with it.
Over the last year I've had a number of hiring conversations with industry colleagues — good people, good conversations, the right shape of thing on paper. None of them ended up in a contract. Some were timing, some were shape-of-role, some were probably just me not being clear enough about what I actually needed.
As always I'm trying to bring values to the process, and hiring turns out to be one of the harder places to do that well. If you've got five minutes, please take a look and tell me what you think. What's clear? What's woolly? What would make you hesitate, and what would make you reply? You can reply to this email, or find me on LinkedIn — whichever is easier.
Got a response to anything here? Something else to share? Reply to this email.
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What happened in Zendesk this week
Platform changes, security updates, and honest opinions from someone who builds on Zendesk every day. One email, Fridays.
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