Zendesk Acquires Agentic Startup Forethought to Push Customer Service Towards Autonomous Agents

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As Zendesk seeks to reshape the customer service landscape, it is betting that artificial intelligence will soon handle the majority of service interactions. To accelerate that shift, the company announced plans to acquire the AI startup Forethought. Specific terms of the deal were not disclosed, but a Zendesk spokesperson revealed it is an all-cash acquisition and its largest to date.

The transaction is expected to close by the end of March. Once completed, Forethought’s technology will bolster Zendesk’s AI capabilities within its Resolution Platform.

“The era of simply managing conversations is over. The future of customer experience requires agentic capabilities built for definitive resolution,” Tom Eggemeier, Zendesk’s chief executive, writes in a press release. “Forethought’s advanced capabilities perfectly align with our vision for agentic service. Together, we will be scaling self-improving AI that learns from every interaction. But technology is just the means. Resolution is our identity, and loyalty is the outcome. This proposed acquisition will ensure our customers have the absolute best tools to drive measurable growth in the AI era.”

Launched in 2018 by Colm Doyle, Deon Nicholas, and Sami Ghoche, Forethought specializes in using generative AI to enhance customer service automation. “As companies grow, support is often one of the first functions to feel the strain. Volume rises. Complexity rises. Expectations rise. The usual answers are familiar: add more people, more process, more layers. That works for a while. Then it gets expensive, slower, and harder to keep consistent,” Ghoche writes in a blog post.

“We saw an opportunity to help businesses resolve more issues, more quickly, with better consistency, across more channels and systems.”

Forethought claims that over the past eight years, the startup has helped businesses reduce ticket volume, lower support costs, and improve resolution times, resulting in over $1 billion in savings. Among the customers using its platform are Airtable, Cohere, Cotopaxi, Datadog, Grammarly, UPS, Upwork, Fiverr, and WordPress.

In 2022, Forbes named Forethought as one of its next billion-dollar startups to watch. It had raised $117 million in venture funding, with capital coming from firms like K9 Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Steadfast Financial, and Blue Cloud Ventures.

More than a move for market consolidation or competitive advantage, Zendesk sees Forethought’s platform as a strategic step toward making its AI agents truly autonomous. It plans to utilize the startup’s technology to help develop purpose-built agents, create self-improving AI that detects workflow gaps, generate new procedures, and test optimizations prior to deployment. In addition, Forethought’s technology will support fully autonomous AI in voice channels and make further inroads into enterprise systems, particularly in areas where APIs don’t exist.

“Forethought was founded on the belief that AI will transform customer experience for every business,” Ghoche says. “Joining Zendesk is the fastest way to accelerate that mission. With Zendesk’s platform, resources, and global reach, we will bring our technology to many more organizations around the world, move faster on innovation, and continue pushing the boundaries of what AI can do in customer experience.”

This is the latest in a series of acquisitions Zendesk has made to stay competitive in the expanding customer service market. Not only does it face incumbents—Salesforce, Freshworks, Dialpad, Microsoft, Intercom, SAP, Genesys, and Google—that are also reimagining their solutions, but also new entrants such as Sierra, Decagon, Dolphin AI, and Yellow AI. Zendesk states that it has invested $500 million in AI-focused deals over the past two years, which, besides Forethought, includes HyperArc and Local Measure. All of this is aimed at helping Zendesk create a $1 billion agentic service business by 2028—it’s already expecting to generate up to $500 million in AI annual recurring revenue by the end of this year, Eggemeier told The AI Economy in December.

Moreover, the Forethought acquisition gives Zendesk fresh momentum as it seeks to redefine customer experience in the AI era. It fulfills a promise Eggemeier made when he told me that Zendesk is no longer aiming to avoid disruption—it intends to be the disruptor.

Zendesk promises Forethought customers that service will continue uninterrupted, and that new customers will still be able to use Forethought’s platform without needing to be Zendesk customers.

Featured Image: Zendesk signage outside the company's 2025 Relate conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on March 26, 2025. Credit: Ken Yeung