I think both approaches can work. An AI-native help desk sounds useful if the AI can actually handle tasks and pass things to a human with the right context. But a mature help desk already has a lot of useful tools, so I’d probably look more at how well it fits the team’s daily work than whether it’s AI-first.

An AI native help desk or zendesk and intercom are not nearly as important as the fact that whichever option you go for should be able to make the work of the support team alot lighter. Once the platform which has been setup for customer support helps make the work of the support team easier, every other feature just makes sense but as long as the system doesn’t lighten the work of the support team, no matter how good it looks or how impressive the features are, then the AI isn’t of much help.

A useful angle here would be to focus on what happens after the AI gets deployed, that goes beyond feature comparison and into real support. It’ll be good to know how much work the team has to still handle themselves after the AI takes charge, would they have to also deal with another layer of support the AI creates or would they find ease with the AI handling the support tickets. Its more about which system helps a support team solve customer problems with less unnecessary workload.

I think the AI-native help desk approach is really interesting. Combining the AI agent directly with customer support could make workflows faster and reduce the repetitive work agents deal with every day. That said, trust will be the key factor especially when handling sensitive customer issues where human judgment still matters. Zendesk and Intercom already have strong ecosystems, so AI-native platforms will need to prove they can deliver both efficiency and reliability. I’d be interested to see how these tools perform in real-world support teams and whether they can genuinely improve customer experience rather than just automate more tasks.

The handoff part seems like a more useful thing to judge than the AI itself. If the AI can draft or summarize a ticket but the human still has to spend time figuring out what happened, it doesn’t really remove much work. I’d be interested in how much easier these AI-native systems make the actual transition from AI to human support.