deltastring weekly
Zendesk news and incisive views
This week
Yesterday was the London edition of the Zendesk Showcase. It was great to see lots of friends from across the trade. I largely avoided the talks this time around, instead spending that time having conversations with people, understanding where the pressure points are.
It was interesting to see the big reversal from "AI will replace most of your people and your customers will be happier and you will save loads of cash" towards a more "AI for speed and repetitive stuff and humans for the deep stuff but it will be basically neutral on cost." Leaving aside the fact that you don't need AI for speed and repetitive stuff (these problems can be solved with deterministic processes), I am concerned about the way they calculated the costs. Today everyone's AI usage is subsidised by Anthropic (etc) investors! These LLM vendors are making massive losses and one day soon that has to end.
Now you know I say take the free ride but we need to be realistic. Factor in the current real cost of the AI usage and plan for paying at least that next year. Don't get hooked on a product when you're not covering the costs. Someone will always be saying "here, try this" but you'll pay for it when you find a stint in the Priory isn't cheap.
Now don't call me a hypocrite when you try the AI product I have built. Manage your Zendesk configuration from your own Claude or Cursor or AI provider of choice, but with the safety and proper processes of a fully featured configuration management platform. We've made it easier to do proper testing and subsequent sandbox to prod promotion than just to YOLO the changes into prod. Plus our product is already profitable and built entirely on sustainable infrastructure. Learn all about it in the post below.
From Deltastring
I’ve been sliding my iPad across the table and letting someone tap a couple of questions in for themselves. People describe a change the way they’d ask a colleague, in plain English, and the tooling goes and does the work. It reads the whole Zendesk configuration, understands the objects and how they hang together, drafts the change, tests it, walks it through the approval step and ships it. The whole workflow gets designed, built, tested and deployed before the coffees go cold. It’s the Claude trick we’re all getting used to being impressed by, only with our full Zendesk tooling doing the work underneath. People got it straight away, because they recognised the problem it solves.
What caught our attention
2 sources · industry · 2026-06-09
Another useful counter to the replace-everyone story: CommBank is funding humans as the specialists for the complex, emotional cases while AI takes the routine, which is the split most teams should be planning for.
2 sources · ai,industry · 2026-06-08
Verizon's CEO shouts the 2024 talking point. We know it's more nuanced but he's not saying this for us customer service experts. The trifecta of well-tested deterministic processes; human empathy and deeper understanding; and AI speed of connecting the dots and bashing out the messages is just how we do things now.
2 sources · industry · 2026-06-09
Your AI assistant is only as good as the context it can see, and that context is still scattered across the CCaaS, the CRM and the analytics tool, with nothing holding the full customer picture.
1 source · industry · 2026-06-09
Apple is moving call prep onto the device, surfacing booking refs and codes during a support call without anything leaving the phone, which quietly changes what a customer already knows by the time they reach your queue. Sounds like it will be very helpful for consumers and support agents! Is the next step to just cut out the actual call? My AI assistant and your AI assistant figure it out between themselves.
What we shipped
Zendesk configuration management
| Your AI assistant can now inspect and change Zendesk config through Beacon, with the same proper processes, testing, approval, one-click rollback wrapped around every change it makes. |
| Promoting config between instances now carries additional safety checks, the same approval gate, rollback and atomic apply, so a multi-instance change is as safe as a single one. |
| Deletes now snapshot the object and run a pre-flight check first, so a risky delete stops before it runs and you keep an exact record of what changed. |
CX platform news, aggregated and analysed
| Visiting /newsletter now opens the latest edition, so a shared or bookmarked link always lands on the most recent issue. |
Worth your time
Maybe I'm just showing my age but the web of the 1990s was plenty good enough for most purposes. Clearly others agree because the Brutalist Report exists and is a great little digest of news links for people in tech. Well worth a bookmark!
I've been asked a bunch of times lately about the music we record. Everyone who has a call with me asks about the electric upright bass in the corner of my office. That bass is on a couple of tracks on the Fighting Mongooses record we did last year. Listen to the album on Bandcamp, Tidal, Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music and let me know what you think.
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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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