Sistava

Forethought

Multi-agent AI platform for enterprise customer support (Solve, Triage, Assist, Discover)

About Forethought

Forethought is a multi-agent customer support platform. Solve resolves issues across chat, email and voice, Triage classifies and routes tickets, Assist gives human agents real-time guidance inside their helpdesk, and Discover surfaces knowledge gaps from the conversation history. It learns from your existing tickets and help center rather than from scripted flows. Zendesk completed its acquisition in March 2026. Sistava is a workforce platform where support is one hire beside sales, marketing and operations.

Platform details

Official website

What is Forethought?

Forethought breaks support into four jobs and gives each one an agent. Solve handles the conversation itself across chat, email, voice and headless channels. Triage reads an incoming ticket, classifies it and routes it. Assist works beside a human agent inside their helpdesk with suggested next steps. Discover reads the whole history and points out where the knowledge base is failing. What holds it together is that all four learn from your own material: past tickets, help center articles, and the policies you have written down. The company describes the agents as reasoning and acting against those policies rather than executing a fixed decision tree, which is the part that made it attractive to acquire. Zendesk completed its acquisition in March 2026 and now sells the agents as part of its own lineup. For a buyer, that mostly means Forethought capability will keep converging on the Zendesk ecosystem rather than staying fully independent.

Support depth versus business coverage

Forethought is what serious support automation looks like: dedicated agents per stage, measurable resolution and response metrics, and enough configuration to satisfy a support leader who owns an SLA. That specialization is the entire point, and comparing it to a general workforce on ticket handling alone would flatter us unfairly. Sistava is answering a different question. When a company is small, support is not a function with a manager and a queue. It is the twelve messages that arrived while you were doing something else, and the follow-ups nobody sent. So a Sistava support employee is deliberately less specialized and more connected. It answers, but it also writes the help article, files the task, updates the record, and hands context to the marketing employee working in the same workspace.

Which one you should be looking at

If you have a support team, a helpdesk and volume measured in thousands of tickets a month, look at Forethought, and look at it inside the Zendesk conversation rather than as a standalone purchase. If you do not have a support team, an enterprise support platform is a large commitment to solve part of a smaller problem. The cost is not only money: scoping, pilots and integration take weeks nobody has. The switching question rarely comes up in this direction, because the two products are bought by different companies at different stages. When it does, the useful test is whether support is a department you staff or a job you keep postponing.

Comparison