deltastring weekly
Zendesk news and incisive views
This week
Salesforce paid $3.6bn this week for Fin, the AI agent vendor formerly known as Intercom, betting an agent can take the conversation off human hands. The same week the government put out an AI tool that writes your CV, and Starmer called it "a job centre in your pocket". AI keeps getting picked for work like this, and not because it does the job better. It's cheaper than the person who used to do it, and cheaper for now, while investors foot the bill on these models. That price won't last. And the first seats to go are the entry-level ones, the bottom rung people climb on to start a career.
What gets cut to make the saving is the part that mattered. Writing the CV was never the hard bit of getting someone back into work. The hard bit is the human stuff around it, the chat that turns into an introduction, the person in your corner who's done this before, and that costs real time and real money, so it's first to go. Rosie worked a contract government employment scheme and helped hundreds back into work. Her piece below is about what the tool leaves out.
We build the other way, and this week we wrote down why, in What we don't do. Every change reversible, a person reads the plan in plain English before it reaches production, one honest audit trail whether a human, an AI or a schedule made the change, and we touch your configuration, never your tickets. Each line is there to make the safe path the quick one, the way a driver takes the proper line through a corner because it's fastest, not because the rulebook says so. What's slower, doing things properly the first time or fixing the problems created with an unsafe rush job?
From Deltastring
The government just launched an AI Work Assistant that writes your CV, hailed by the Prime Minister as "a job centre in your pocket". Deltastring CEO Rosie gigged on a government employment scheme and helped hundreds back into work and knows where the real gaps are.
What caught our attention
35 sources · competitor,industry · 2026-06-16
You don't have to be Einstein to understand that there is consolidation on the horizon for enterprise support solutions. Zendesk investors took the company private, cut headcount, went on an acquisition spree, plan a fresh flotation to cash out. This creates a window of vulnerability which has coincided with AI going from a toy to borderline essential. They now face well-funded armies on two fronts. Salesforce with Fin will be targeting the mega scale implementations while new platforms like Pylon and Bolddesk try and undercut Zendesk at the other end of the market. We track a couple dozen Zendesk competitors and they can't all be winners but they do all see that now is the time to eat away at that market share. Hemingway might have said the pressure increased gradually and then suddenly.
2 sources · industry,ai · 2026-06-17
Finding how to compare human and AI agents is a tricky task. It's well established that human time is the premium support process as I commented here but that doesn't mean your chatbot can get away with getting things wrong.
What we shipped
Zendesk configuration management
| Your AI assistant can now make changes in Beacon, but it can't push them to production on its own. Someone on your team approves the plan first, exactly as they would for a change a person proposed. |
| You can download a full report of what a deletion will affect before you run it. Beacon checks the object is safe to remove and snapshots it first, so a risky delete stops before it does anything you can't take back. |
| Beacon now migrates your Zendesk custom objects to the new system for you. It maps everything across and shows you up front anything that won't transfer cleanly, so the gaps surface before the move, not after. |
| Signing up is open to anyone now, with Google sign-in and an automatic first sync. Connect your Zendesk and your configuration is pulled in and ready, with no invite or manual setup to wait on. |
| A knowledge base of Zendesk conventions, written by practitioners, is built into the app. The same guidance reaches any AI assistant you connect, so it works to the standards you would. |
Worth your time
I put together a little gradient page showing the same two colours blended different ways. Move in a straight line through RGB values and you get one journey between them; move by a steady change in hue angle and you get a completely different one. RGB gradients travel through grey-brown mush. Linear chroma and luminance create rich and vivid transitions. Firefox, my browser since before it was even called Firefox, still renders these in sRGB, while Chrome reaches a far wider range of colour. Put the LCH gradient in front of both and Chrome shows colours Firefox can't reach. Have a play and see what you like!
A fun one as the weather turns. Feynman's handwritten notes on the restaurant problem have been deciphered, fifty years on. How do you find the best place to eat on a short holiday? His answer is a quality bar that starts high and falls as the days run out. Try somewhere new each night until one clears the bar, then go back to your favourite for the rest of the trip. It's how people shop for a tool, too. You hold out for the thing that does everything early on, and "good enough" reduces as the deadline nears.
Got a response to anything here? Something else to share? Reply to this email.
Forwarded this? Subscribe here.
Deltastring Ltd · deltastring.com
Unsubscribe · View in browser
What happened in Zendesk this week
Platform changes, security updates, and honest opinions from someone who builds on Zendesk every day. One email, Fridays.
“This is the only newsletter I want in my inbox, a beacon in a world of spam”