deltastring weekly
Zendesk news and incisive views
This week
I didn't catch the Zendesk Relate streams this year. Too busy with work! I still have not attended a Relate in person and this year was never going to be the year that changed because the US is not an appealing destination right now. Naturally LinkedIn and the various gossip group chats were the best place to follow along! We're attending the London Showcase so let's get some coffee chats booked in.
My sense is that we're seeing the Tim Cook phase of SaaS. Careful tending to what exists, not looking to rock the boat. We'll never see an iPhone moment at a Zendesk event.
It's a part of the wider business climate. Feels like everyone is quietly waiting to see if Anthropic or OpenAI can somehow become profitable. In the meantime every platform is plumbing in these products which build upon ChatGPT, Claude, etc, but without considering that these services are provided at a huge loss. If you're making good cash as a middleware with Claude, what do you do when your Claude bill is 10x? Pivot I suppose.
Vendors have an alternative: rethink the pricing strategy. Move everyone to new contracts where they can manage their exposure to model pricing. That's what outcome-based pricing is for. Billing on resolutions rather than seats, so the margin holds even when the LLM bill 10x's. The days of knowing what your costs will be a quarter ahead are long gone. Time to generate some headroom and cross your fingers! For the buyer side: read that contract carefully, revisit your backup plans, evaluate alternative options.
It's not a Zendesk problem, it's an industry wide issue. It's the sub-prime scenario for software. Preparing for panic costs money now but you don't regret fixing that roof when winter comes.
From Deltastring
There aren't enough women running tech companies and the British government want to change this. Deltastring chief Rosie knows why this scheme isn't enough, and where to find the solutions.
What caught our attention
3 sources · ai · 2026-05-19
Moving from pricing per seat to pricing by outcome penalises the people who went all-in on the platform. Are you one of those who made your Zendesk super efficient, do you do a lot with little headcount? Before your bill was based on the little, now it will be based on the lot.
2 sources · general · 2026-05-20
AI pilots in retail are stalling, and it's rarely the AI that's the problem. The knowledge base hasn't been touched in years. The integrations never got tested. Customer data lives in nine systems and gets joined up by hand. Sort the configuration first and the AI has something real to work with.
2 sources · features,industry · 2026-05-20
Microsoft has added AI spend forecasting into Dynamics. WFM teams can now plan token consumption the way they used to plan headcount. Most other vendors haven't done this yet, so for now it's a spreadsheet job. I expect other platforms will see this and replicate it.
2 sources · general · 2026-05-19
Zendesk shut down Sell last year, a quiet admission that the Salesforce-killer strategy was over. Even internally, Zendesk runs Salesforce. So with a $500m AI ARR target needing more customers than Zendesk-only shops can supply, the agents are going to live wherever the work is, including inside Salesforce and Freshworks. Good news for the practitioner who never wanted a consolidation project. Zendesk has accepted being the AI layer on top of someone else's CRM rather than the platform that replaced it.
What we shipped
Zendesk configuration management
| Beacon now has a Workflows layer: guided, multi-step actions for the things Zendesk admins actually want to do, rather than asking them to assemble it from primitives. The first set covers audit, drift review, deletion-impact analysis, bulk edits, trigger reordering, snapshot restore, sandbox realignment, instance comparison, and inactive-config cleanup. |
| Promote now intercepts more classes of issue before they reach production. Duplicate-vs-update mistakes get caught before they happen, dependency walking handles objects that share IDs, pushes are gated on conflicts, and unmapped or broken references surface as errors rather than silent failures. |
| Account Settings are now diffable and promotable like every other config object. The last patch of untracked Zendesk configuration is closed off. |
| Sandbox pairing automatically detects and links a sandbox to its production parent. Sync also shows which fetcher is running and warns before you navigate away during the first sync. |
| AI summaries now load on demand with per-user and per-organisation cost ceilings. AI spend is bounded by policy rather than discovered in the invoice. |
CX platform news, aggregated and analysed
| Latest newsletter link now appears in the From Deltastring panel header for easier access |
| Previous newsletter editions are linked on the web archive, with the latest edition featured on the homepage |
Worth your time
Nate Silver on Disney quietly erasing FiveThirtyEight. 200,000 person-hours of statistical journalism, redirected to ABC News's homepage. He thinks about the mistakes he made with the business. The horrifying bit is that a big corp can just vandalise such an amazing chunk of historic work and understanding.
Someone installed every Firefox extension, all 84,194 of them. about:addons now takes six hours to render. Firefox eats 32GB of RAM. The verdict is "no".
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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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