McDermott: Traditional customer support metrics are obsolete in an AI era
Adrian McDermott · Zendesk's Adrian McDermott: AI's Customer Service Potential, Adoption Cycle, Scale vs. Orchestration · Dec 5, 2025 · at 4:59
Zendesk CTO Adrian McDermott discusses how AI automation alters core operational KPIs in customer support.
0:00 / 0:41exact quote · 42.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Customer service is this human powered factory, right? The metrics are ones of throughput and effort. It's like tickets today, per day, time to first response. You know, all of these things where you're measuring productivity, average handle time. In an AI world, you know, especially when you're automating tickets, tickets per day is infinite. You know, I'll just, there will be more inference. It's fine, right? Average handle time is talk to me for as long as you want. The more you, the longer you engage, the better it is, right? Time to first response is usually about 300 milliseconds, depending on how many inference trips, chips were available for your provider. And so even the metrics are outdated in an AI era.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Adrian McDermott
McDermott: AI can automate 80-100% of text support, but voice is unready
“If it's an easy landscape and we can cover the API estate with what we have, you could really get to 80 or a hundred percent depending on where you want to go. So as of today, it's all there. I think voice isn't quite there, and that's it.”
McDermott: Production-ready mass-market voice AI is roughly a year away
“Well, I think it's almost, it's basically ready now, so we're only kind of a yearish away, but I think to get it mass market, mass scale, and always get the latency and reliability that we want, probably still, probably, you know, that's coming online in the n…”
McDermott: Automating Support Drives Increased Human Escalations
“One of the things that we say is automation drives escalation. You know, as I automate something, more and more people, the Alex's of the world are pressing zero and asking to talk to the operator. And that isn't coming away.”
McDermott: Lack of backend APIs is the primary blocker for AI agents taking action
“I think if you don't have an API on that system, we can't swivel chair yet. With an AI agent effectively or, you know, reliably. And, you know, we can vibe code and build the integration for them, but the API has to be there. And so mostly the blocker, like wh…”
McDermott: Coding models will drive support automation more than computer-use agents
“I actually think what's really going to make a difference more likely than computer use models, computer using models is just the improvements in coding models. And that's a little bit basing the future on the immediate past. Coding models have gotten gotten s…”