Getting AI right starts with knowledge: A guide for service leaders

The AI era is here—and CX leaders are racing to move fast and prove ROI. It’s easy to see why: the promise of automation is irresistible. But in the rush to scale, many teams skip a critical first step: preparing the knowledge their AI depends on.

Because fundamentally, AI doesn’t become intelligent on its own, it retrieves and reasons based on the quality of the knowledge beneath it. Your AI is only ever as good as what it has to work with. When knowledge is accurate and connected, AI is both reliable and fast. But when your knowledge is fragmented and outdated, AI can suddenly become unpredictable. Hallucinations creep in. Quality scores fall. Automation rates drop and escalations rise. And the customer experience—your brand—takes the hit.

There’s a paradigm shift taking place, and it directly impacts the role of knowledge managers and service leaders everywhere. Knowledge is no longer a static help center that customers visit when trying to find an answer. It’s a dynamic and strategic component of your resolutions, ensuring that accurate information shows up across channels, at the right time, in the right format. And with this shift comes an opportunity for the people behind the technology: knowledge managers are upleveled into service architects, no longer doing the operational work of writing and updating articles, but rather supervising AI, and encoding the procedures of great human agents into structured knowledge that AI can replicate at scale.

What we’ve seen from helping thousands of organizations make this shift is simple: trustworthy AI starts with trustworthy knowledge. Zendesk’s Resolution Platform grounds AI in real-world resolution data and the industry’s most complete service knowledge ecosystem, giving teams the confidence to move fast without breaking trust.

Adopting a knowledge-first mindset

AI is dramatically disrupting service as we’ve known it, reshaping the defining rituals around service roles and organizations, processes, and metrics that have been established for years. Success in this new environment requires a shift: adopting a knowledge-first mindset. One that treats your knowledge as a strategic asset, worthy of defined governance and measurement.

Doing so requires three key shifts:

1. Treating knowledge as a strategic, evolving product. It’s not a standalone help center – it’s a living, breathing ecosystem that guides and informs every great resolution.
2. Defining a governance process. You can’t just “set it and forget it” when it comes to your service knowledge. You must establish a process for continuous governance, measurement, and improvement.
3. Knowledge is serving AI just as much as humans. Humans, whether customers or agents, are no longer the sole audience of your knowledge. When crafting and organizing knowledge, teams must consider how well AI can retrieve, understand and activate knowledge content.

The strongest service teams bring this mindset to life through a closed loop between people, knowledge, and AI – what we call the Resolution Learning Loop™. Every interaction improves content, content trains AI, and AI accelerates resolutions. Over time, the entire system becomes faster, smarter, and more reliable.

What “AI‑ready knowledge” looks like

A knowledge-first mindset is only meaningful if it’s backed by knowledge that AI can trust. From helping thousands of CX organizations navigate this shift, we’ve learned that AI-ready knowledge has four defining characteristics that set you up for success in automation:

1. Accurate and current

   Accurate knowledge prevents misinformation and builds trust—critical when 63% of customers will switch to a competitor after just one bad experience. AI can’t answer what it doesn’t understand, so having content that is fresh and accurate prevents frustration and unlocks higher‑quality responses.

2. Connected and consistent

   Fragmented knowledge creates fragmented AI experiences. As teams grow and sources expand, duplication and conflicting info can quietly erode trust. AI works best when it has a single, audited source of truth, so customers get consistent answers rather than mixed messages.

3. Structured and searchable

   As AI handles more customer interactions, ensuring it’s connected to the right information is everything. Make your knowledge retrievable and you make your AI reliable. In practice, this means knowledge must be structured, intent-aligned, and easy for both humans and AI to read.

   

4. Governed and measurable

   Governance and measurement close the loop and keep your foundation healthy. In practice, this looks like defined ownership and review cadences, retirement rules, and analytics to measure how knowledge drives resolutions. With the right system in place, knowledge becomes a self-improving system—one that strengthens your AI with every interaction.

A step-by-step guide for achieving AI-ready knowledge, powered by Zendesk

AI‑readiness doesn’t happen overnight—but with the right tools and focus, you can accelerate your path. Our guide breaks the journey into four phases. Each phase strengthens your foundation for trustworthy, scalable AI.

Phase 1: Plan — Align on outcomes and what “good” looks like

In this foundational phase, the goal is to align your teams on a shared vision for how knowledge will power AI. Start by defining who it will serve, how AI will use it (whether through search, AI agents, Copilot), and the KPIs you’ll use to measure impact over time. Next, assess your overall content health. Identify where your critical sources of knowledge live today, what topics your customers ask about the most, and where duplication or content gaps exist that could create challenges. This is also the time to establish ownership and governance rules early so your foundation remains accurate and trustworthy as you scale.

Zendesk enablers: Use Intents and Macros to identify your top customer requests, and best practices for resolving them. Consult the self-service dashboard and AI Insights dashboard for KPIs.

Phase 2: Build & Connect — Turn your plan into a connected foundation your AI can trust

With your plan in place, you can now focus on building the connected knowledge foundation your AI can rely on—one structured around customer intents and unified across every source of truth. Unify knowledge from across third-party tools and internal sources to give AI the complete picture. Organize content around customer intents so every piece of content answers a clear question. Achieving this will be aided by adopting best practices for writing for generative AI, such as standardized templates, clear titles, and tagging to boost retrievability and consistency.

Zendesk enablers: Knowledge builder quickly builds and standardizes your help center content. Knowledge connectors bring your various external knowledge sources into a single, searchable network. Leverage generative AI writing tools to help craft content faster.

Phase 3: Launch & Activate — Put knowledge to work across your channels

With a solid foundation in place, it’s time to bring your knowledge to life by making it instantly usable across every experience: customers, employees, agents, and AI. Three high-impact actions that define this phase include:

• Make trusted answers instantly discoverable: customers and employees should find accurate information quickly and effortlessly across channels.
• Empower agents with knowledge directly in their workflow: equip agents to access the right information at the right time, without needing to search for it. Provide them with the mechanisms to contribute back – closing gaps, and improving content.
• Connect your knowledge to an AI agent, and begin piloting automation with your highest-volume intents. Scale as your confidence grows.

Zendesk enablers: Generative search and quick answers enable frictionless answer discovery for customers and agents. Knowledge capture enables agents to directly update articles from the Agent Workspace. AI agents allow you to scale your knowledge content by delivering answers automatically, across channels.

Phase 4: Optimize & Continuously Improve — Build a self-improving system that compounds

AI-ready knowledge isn’t a one and done achievement. It evolves over time alongside your customers, products, and operations. The final phase is about closing the loop, so every interaction strengthens your content, content raises AI accuracy, and AI lifts resolution quality and ROI. Leaders who excel in this phase focus on these key actions:

• Measure impact relentlessly: looks for key indicators such as fewer escalations on targeted intents and/or a higher self service ratio. These indicate your customers and employees are finding answers on their own or via AI, without requiring human intervention.
• Evolve content based on real usage: use key performance signals to identify outdated or missing content, and adjust as customer intents shift or new products are launched.

Zendesk enablers: Track KPIs using the self-service and AI Insights dashboards.

Bringing it all together: Build the foundation, then scale the automation

You wouldn’t build a house without a foundation. The same applies to AI: your knowledge is the bedrock of trustworthy automation. Treat it like the strategic asset it is and you’ll see the returns—happier customers, faster resolutions, and lower operating costs.

With Zendesk’s customer‑tested readiness guide and Resolution Platform, you can move quickly and confidently. Get your knowledge AI‑ready, and build a foundation for long‑term success. Successful AI isn’t magic—it’s great knowledge, put to work.