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Driving the Next Chapter of AI-Powered CX in APAC: Exclusive Interview with Mitch Young, Senior VP- APAC, Zendesk
From India’s festive travel rush to APAC’s rising digital demands, customer experience is being redefined by the twin forces of AI and rising digital expectations.
In this exclusive interaction, Mitch Young, Senior Vice President, APAC at Zendesk, shares how the integration of GPT-5 into Zendesk’s Resolution Platform is reshaping customer experiences across Asia-Pacific.
Further discusses responsible AI adoption, India’s festive CX challenges, and the future of customer expectations in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.
With the recent integration of GPT-5 now powering Zendesk’s Resolution Platform, how is this AI partnership transforming customer experiences and strengthening your edge in APAC? How is Zendesk ensuring responsible AI adoption across APAC?
In a region where digital expectations and competitive pressures accelerate daily, we are constantly benchmarking the world’s best language models for value, security, and real-world performance. Our partnership with OpenAI is an example of our commitment to anticipate and not follow the direction of innovation. The integration of GPT-5 is already yielding tangible results, including a 20% reduction in escalations and up to 30% faster workflow speeds for our customers.
Zendesk’s focus on AI for service continues to drive distinct value for businesses across APAC. Our core philosophy since day one has been simple: remove the complexity of underlying technology so that customers can focus on delivering world-class customer and employee experiences. With the relentless pace of AI innovation, Zendesk is architected to be model-agnostic and multi-modal. This way, customers get the best in breed without having to re-engineer or retrain their support stack as technology evolves.
AI’s promise is nothing without trust. At Zendesk, we embed responsible AI at every stage: transparent processes, robust data governance, privacy by design, and clear controls for both customers and agents. We are committed to ensuring every innovation is grounded in security and accountability, so organisations can confidently advance their service ambitions.
India’s festive travel rush from Navratri to New Year puts unique pressure on CX. What must brands do differently with AI to keep customer journeys seamless? How is Zendesk preparing for it?
India’s festive travel season is a crucible for customer experience, where operational resilience and brand loyalty are truly tested. When 7 in 10 Indian consumers are prepared to switch brands after just one poor interaction, the stakes are high. In this climate, brands must elevate personalisation and self-service, ensuring support is not only prompt but contextually relevant and empathetic. AI plays a crucial role in this process by automating routine interactions, predicting user intent, and facilitating seamless, instantaneous handovers between AI and human agents.
At Zendesk, we view these surges as opportunities for our customers to differentiate and deepen engagement. Our teams proactively reach out to customers when we notice surges, offering tailored, data-driven strategies that drive efficiency and customer satisfaction at scale.
This includes recommending robust self-service tools such as AI-powered agents for instant assistance, generative knowledge bases with retrieval-augmented search, and no-code Action Builder workflows for agile automation. Our latest copilots empower teams with contextual prompts, smart summarisation, and prioritisation during spikes, while real-time monitoring and advanced QA maintain quality at scale.
By combining advanced AI with proactive partnership, we help customers transform festive spikes into moments of exceptional service and enable faster resolutions, reducing agent strain, and building enduring loyalty beyond the season.
Indian consumers are often more mobile-first, price-sensitive, and festive-driven compared to APAC peers. What unique CX pressures does this create, and how is Zendesk adapting AI differently here versus markets like Japan or Singapore?
Indian consumers are redefining customer experience standards, expecting brands to provide seamless omnichannel journeys and AI-powered service with a distinctly human touch. As digital adoption accelerates, customers demand resolution with empathy, context, and speed on the channels that matter to them, especially during India’s festive seasons, when operational agility becomes a true differentiator.
Historically, CX investments in India may have prioritised cost, reflecting a legacy of labour-based approaches, but that paradigm has shifted. Today, competitive advantage lies in deploying advanced AI to deliver experiences and efficiencies beyond what human teams alone can achieve. Forward-thinking businesses recognise that investing in modern CX platforms is now essential to driving retention, adoption, and growth in India’s dynamic environment.
Our customers see that exceptional experience is no longer a cost centre—it is an engine for commercial impact and sustainable growth. Importantly, this isn’t just a promise—it’s proven. A Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study, based on real customer interviews, found that a composite organisation adopting Zendesk’s AI-powered solutions realised a 301% ROI, a net present value of US$23.2 million, and payback in less than six months. In today’s market, investing in customer experience is one of the clearest levers for value creation.
Looking ahead, what emerging trends in customer expectations do you believe will define CX in APAC, and how is Zendesk positioning itself to lead that evolution?
Customer expectations across APAC are shifting decisively towards faster, more meaningful outcomes. People want issues solved in real time, with a level of personalisation and continuity that extends across every channel from mobile and messaging to voice and the contact centre. This focus on seamless, outcome-driven experiences reflects a broader macro trend: as digital adoption accelerates and choices proliferate, customer loyalty will increasingly be won by brands that deliver true resolution—not merely quick responses.
Industry-wide, the standard for customer experience is being redefined. Resolution has become the decisive benchmark—moving beyond speed or volume to ensuring that every customer interaction achieves a clear, satisfactory conclusion. Realising this goal requires the right combination of human empathy and intelligent technology.
And this is a prime opportunity for us to realise the full potential of the partnership between human and AI agents, where the AI agent drives swifter resolutions for more routine instances, empowering the human agent to deliver higher value and more personalised interactions.
This is precisely the ambition behind our investments in the Zendesk Resolution Platform. We are bringing together advanced AI, automation, real-time analytics, and a focus on intuitive design—enabling organisations to anticipate needs, personalise at scale, and consistently resolve customer issues, however and wherever they arise.
As expectations rise, our commitment is to enable businesses across APAC to achieve measurable gains in customer satisfaction, efficiency, and loyalty, equipping them to excel in a landscape defined by rapid change and increasing complexity.
