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The Sources area is where administrators control the material AI Assistant can retrieve when it handles Zendesk work. Open Sources in the Assistant workspace to switch between the available source types.

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Source types

Assistant also has a separate Library containing Gallery assets and Updates.

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Sources are not all equivalent

Use the right source for the job:
  • Put a refund policy in a KNOWLEDGE procedure.
  • Put a refund workflow and action sequence in a RUNBOOK.
  • Put tone, terminology, and translation rules in AI Guidelines.
  • Keep product documentation in Help Center Articles, uploaded documents, or indexed websites.
  • Describe custom Zendesk field values in Ticket Fields instead of teaching them repeatedly in prompts.
  • Store reusable screenshots, forms, PDFs, or other reply assets in Gallery.
  • Use Updates for temporary guidance such as incidents or policy changes with a defined active period.

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Semantic retrieval

Procedures, guidelines, articles, and other searchable knowledge depend on embeddings for semantic retrieval. If active content is missing embeddings, the Sources workspace exposes administrator repair tooling that can re-embed affected procedures, Help Center articles, and guidelines and surface the provider error when embedding fails.
A source can exist in the dashboard and still fail to retrieve if its embedding is missing or its targeting excludes the current ticket. When diagnosing an answer, inspect the sources recorded in Ticket Activity instead of assuming every active-looking row was available to the model.

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Zendesk-only sources

Help Center Articles, Ticket Fields, and Macros are Assistant resources because they come from the connected Zendesk environment. They are not automatically exposed to the public AI Chatbot. If your organization uses both products, treat Chatbot publication as a separate customer-facing trust decision.

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Targeting

Procedures, guidelines, Gallery assets, and other resources can use targeting information such as groups, Zendesk organizations, languages, or tags where supported. Use targeting to represent real support-policy boundaries rather than to create many almost-identical copies of the same rule.

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Review what an answer used

When investigating an Assistant result, use Activity → Ticket Activity to inspect the stored run details. The log can show resources used by the response, including procedures and AI Guides. This is the fastest way to distinguish a bad source from a source that was never selected.

Procedures

Create factual knowledge and operational runbooks.

AI Guidelines

Control Response and Translate behavior.

Zendesk and document sources

Sync Help Center articles, fields, macros, files, and websites.

Library

Manage reusable Gallery assets and temporary Updates.