Using an AI agent for messaging in the Slack Direct Messages channel

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Team, Growth, Professional, Enterprise, or Enterprise Plus

This functionality is part of AI agents - Essential.

You can add an AI agent for messaging to your Slack Direct Messages channel to deliver automated AI agent functionality to your Slack-messaging connection.

Note: The feature described in this article is used with the Slack Direct Messages channel for messaging. It does not apply to the Slack for Zendesk Support integration.

This article includes the following topics:

• Account requirements, feature limitations, and best practices
• Adding an AI agent to your Slack DM channel
• Removing the AI agent from your Slack DM channel

Account requirements, feature limitations, and best practices

Before adding an AI agent to your Slack DM configuration, your account must meet the following requirements:

• Agent Workspace and messaging activated.
• At least one Chat-enabled agent.
• The Slack Direct Messages channel for Zendesk messaging activated.
• An AI agent for messaging. You can publish a previously built AI agent, or create a new AI agent to use in the channel.

Some AI agent for messaging features perform differently in the Slack DM channel than in other messaging channels:

• The Greeting response does not appear in the conversation.
• (Legacy) The Ask for details step is not available in the Slack DM channel. If it is included as part of an answer in your conversation flow, it will be bypassed.

Because of the above limitations, there are a number of best practices we recommend when creating your AI agent:

• Turn off the automated fallback response.
• Create a trigger to immediately close solved tickets.
• (Legacy) Because the Greeting response is not active in the conversation, we recommend creating an answer that includes a welcome message, with conversation starters (such as “hello”) as intents.

Adding an AI agent to your Slack DM channel

When your account is ready, you can integrate the AI agent for messaging with your Slack DM channel.

To add the AI agent to your Slack DM channel

1. Sign in to Slack using the dedicated Zendesk user account.
2. In Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then select AI agents > AI agents.
3. Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
4. On the AI agents page, do one of the following:
   • Click create a new AI agent and publish it to the Slack DM channel.
   • Click an existing AI agent you want to use and publish it to the Slack DM channel.

Note: (Legacy) Panels in the Add Carousel step are displayed in a list, rather than as a scrollable array. Otherwise, they function as expected.

Removing the AI agent from your Slack DM channel

If you no longer want to include an AI agent for messaging in your Slack DM channel, you can disconnect it. The channel will then resume Slack DM Support functionality.

When you disconnect the AI agent from the channel:

• Conversations that have been handed off to an agent are unaffected.
• If the end user interacts with the AI agent, for example by entering text or clicking a button, they are handed off to an agent. This is a “silent handoff”, and the end user will not receive an automated response or notification of the handoff until the agent responds.

To remove AI agent functionality from your Slack DM channel

1. In Admin Center, click AI in the sidebar, then select AI agents > AI agents.
2. Click Manage AI agents for messaging.
3. Hover over the AI agent you want to update and click Settings.
4. In the General tab, scroll down to the Brands and channels section.
5. Deselect the AI agent you want to remove.
6. Click Save.

Note: Adding the AI agent to another channel automatically removes it from the Slack DM channel.