Zendesk acquires Unleash to strengthen employee service

Zendesk acquires Unleash, an AI-powered enterprise search platform, to strengthen its employee service capabilities and improve how organizations access and use internal knowledge. The acquisition is aimed at helping employees receive fast, accurate answers directly within the collaboration tools they already use.

Unleash’s technology connects knowledge across multiple company systems while strictly adhering to existing data permissions and security policies. This ensures that responses delivered to employees remain compliant and trustworthy.

Expanding employee service with AI search

With this acquisition, Zendesk integrates enterprise search capabilities that unify information across more than 70 content sources, including platforms such as Google Drive, Confluence and SharePoint. The technology applies permission-based retrieval at query time, ensuring employees only see information they are authorised to access.

By connecting enterprise search with case management, automation and analytics, Zendesk aims to help organisations resolve employee issues more quickly, automate routine queries and reduce the cost and complexity of internal support operations.

Native AI agents in collaboration tools

Unleash’s platform brings native AI knowledge agents directly into collaboration environments such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. These agents provide answers within the flow of work and support seamless escalation to human experts when required.

The solution includes a robust connector library with fine-grained access controls and AI agents built with organisational context, allowing employees to retrieve meaningful insights drawn from across company data systems.

Impact on internal and external support

Integrating Unleash into Zendesk’s employee service workflows is expected to improve resolution times for high-impact internal support cases while maintaining enterprise-grade security and privacy standards.

The acquisition also extends Zendesk’s broader service platform by applying the same AI, governance and workflow capabilities to both internal employee support and external customer service use cases.

Comment

“As organizations rapidly adopt AI, rethinking how they deliver internal employee support is becoming mission-critical,” said Shashi Upadhyay, President of Product, Engineering and AI at Zendesk. “Zendesk’s acquisition of Unleash puts AI directly in the flow of work, delivering secure, permission-based answers from across company systems so employees get instant self-service with seamless handoffs to human experts when needed.”

Itay Itzhaki, Co-founder and CEO at Unleash, said the acquisition supports a shared focus on accessibility of information. “This acquisition aligns directly with our mission to make information accessible and actionable right where work happens. Our AI-powered search and retrieval technology will help companies deliver faster, smarter employee support while keeping security and privacy at the forefront.”

What the acquisition signals

With Zendesk acquiring Unleash, the company is positioning enterprise search and contextual AI as core components of modern employee service. The move reflects a growing emphasis on integrating knowledge access directly into daily workflows, rather than treating internal support as a separate system.

The acquisition underscores how AI-driven enterprise search is becoming central to scaling employee service operations in large, distributed organisations.