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Zendesk and Unleash: A Game-Changing Acquisition for Employee Support

In a bold step toward revolutionizing employee service, Zendesk has officially acquired Unleash, a cutting-edge enterprise search platform driven by artificial intelligence. This acquisition, announced on December 18, 2025, is potentially transformative, as it aims to enhance internal support processes using AI technology.

Unifying Knowledge Across Systems

Unleash's technology specializes in connecting knowledge across disparate systems, enabling organizations to provide swift and accurate responses to employee inquiries. By integrating Unleash's AI capabilities into its platform, Zendesk aspires to automate routine questions, streamline case management, and provide deep analytics—all aimed at improving the efficiency of internal support.

This strategic acquisition empowers employees to find answers directly within their usual collaboration environments, whether through Slack or Microsoft Teams. Unleash guarantees that all responses comply with the organization's data permissions and security measures, fostering trust in the reliability of the information provided.

Key Features of Unleash's Technology

One of the standout features of Unleash is its enterprise search capability, which can pull information from over 70 different content sources including Google Drive, Confluence, and SharePoint. The platform supports native AI knowledge agents that enable seamless handoffs to human experts when necessary, ensuring that employees receive comprehensive support tailored to their needs.

Moreover, the term permission-based retrieval augmented generation (RAG) allows for granular access control, making it suitable for organizations that prioritize data security while facilitating knowledge sharing among teams. By implementing AI agents that utilize end-to-end organizational context, Zendesk is equipping employees with valuable insights from across the spectrum of company data.

Accelerating Time to Resolution

The integration of Unleash into Zendesk's employee service workflows is set to significantly reduce the time it takes to resolve internal support issues. Coupled with Zendesk's existing capabilities, this acquisition means the company can now provide a more refined and comprehensive support service across its entire portfolio. Whether it’s customer-facing or internal processes, the combination of capabilities creates a robust service framework.

Shashi Upadhyay, the President of Product, Engineering, and AI at Zendesk, emphasizes the urgency for organizations to rethink their internal support delivery as they adopt AI at an increasing pace. He points out that integrating AI into the daily workflow allows for permission-based answers directly from various systems, leading to better self-service options for employees, and ensuring a smooth transition to a human expert when necessary.

Itay Itzhaki, Co-founder and CEO of Unleash, echoes this sentiment by indicating that their AI-powered retrieval technology is crucial for companies aiming to enhance the availability and usability of their knowledge while emphasizing security and privacy.

Conclusion

By acquiring Unleash, Zendesk is not just acquiring a technology, but is also reinforcing its mission to make information actionable and accessible at the point of work. This acquisition is likely to have lasting impacts, not just on Zendesk's framework, but on the broader landscape of employee service, where fast, reliable, and secure responses are increasingly becoming the norm. As AI continues to evolve, industries can anticipate a transformation in how workplaces approach internal support, making it more efficient, cost-effective, and integrated.