When Deon and I started Forethought, we were focused on a single problem.

As companies grow, support is often one of the first functions to feel the strain. Volume rises. Complexity rises. Expectations rise. The usual answers are familiar: add more people, more process, more layers. That works for a while. Then it gets expensive, slower, and harder to keep consistent.

Over eight years ago, we believed AI could change that.

We saw an opportunity to help businesses resolve more issues, more quickly, with better consistency, across more channels and systems.

We’ve always believed the future of customer experience should feel more like part of the product. CX systems should be context-aware and more capable of taking action. If a customer has a problem, the system should be able to understand what happened, know why, and help drive the issue toward resolution. This has been the bar for us from day one.

Today, I’m excited to share that Forethought has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Zendesk. Read the official press release here.

For us, this is an acceleration of the mission.

From the beginning, we believed AI would become a core part of how every business delivers customer experience. That belief has only gotten stronger. What has changed is the technology. It is now much closer to matching the vision. More of the work can happen reliably, with clear outcomes for customers and businesses. In CX, adoption has moved quickly for a reason: the ROI is legit, and the tech has reached the point where it can make a consistent, material impact.

Zendesk understands where service is going. They understand that the future is bigger than layering AI onto support. It’s about taking action, improving over time, and helping teams deliver a higher standard of service.

A lot of the conversation around AI in CX still centers on assistance, deflection, or cost reduction. Those things matter, but they are only part of the story. If a customer is waiting two days for an answer, and AI can help resolve that issue immediately, the value goes far beyond labor savings.

Over the last several years, our team has built a lot and learned even more. Many of our best ideas came from our customers and from being pushed toward harder, more ambitious problems. Customers did not want a collection of AI tools. They want something that can work across channels, processes, and the environments where CX happens. When done well, that creates a much better customer experience.

Joining Zendesk gives us the chance to push that work much further and much faster.

With Zendesk’s global reach, platform depth, and long-standing position in service, we can bring what we’ve built to many more organizations. We can move faster on the roadmap, tackle bigger problems, and keep building toward a future where CX is more autonomous, adaptive, and capable than most teams have access to today.

I also want to say something directly to our customers.

The trust you’ve placed in Forethought means a lot to us. Many of you took a bet on us early. Many of you pushed us to raise the bar. Many of our strongest product decisions came from watching how your teams work, where support gets messy, and what good service requires in practice.

That will stay the same.

What changes now is the scale behind the work. We’ll have more ability to invest, move faster, and bring these capabilities to more service teams around the world.

I’m incredibly proud of the Forethought team for getting us here. We’ve stayed focused on customer problems and business stakes in a category that is evolving quickly. That’s required conviction, a lot of learning, and a willingness to build ahead of where the market was comfortable.

We still believe the same basic thing we did when we started: customer experience is one of the most important functions in any business, and AI will reshape it in a deep way.

Now we get to keep pursuing that vision with a partner that sees the future of service in a very similar way.

I’m excited for what we get to build next.

Sami