McDermott: Autonomous continual learning creates an unverifiable black box for enterprise support
Adrian McDermott · Zendesk's Adrian McDermott: AI's Customer Service Potential, Adoption Cycle, Scale vs. Orchestration · Dec 5, 2025 · at 37:30
Adrian McDermott, CTO of Zendesk, explains why structured human-in-the-loop workflows remain safer and more transparent for enterprise AI than self-learning models.
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“When we're changing the machine and we're writing new articles and we're building new macros, it's sort of easy for the humans who own that machine to understand what's going on. Like the head of support technology can be like, yep, yep, that is the correct workflow. We should do that. That's, those are our, those are the rules of my business. I think when it's, there's a little bit of a, Black box fright, where you don't know what's going on inside, which is generally a large language bottle problem, right? Where that kind of continual learning, I suppose we could have the model express what's happening chain of thought style, but that's the sort of downside to it.”
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