Action Flows: what replaces the ZIS detour today

The ZIS detour once broke a product boundary: data transformation between two systems, assembled through a ZIS inbound webhook, no UI, debugging done blind. That boundary is gone. What used to be a DIY build is now called Action Flows and ships as part of the product.

What Action Flows come with

The toolbox covers what a workflow needs:

• Loops and while-loops: iterate over lists, repeat until a condition is met.
• Conditions: branches in the flow. They don’t nest (yet), so complex logic has to be planned flat.
• Custom Code: for anything the building blocks can’t do. It runs synchronously only, so the flow waits for the result before it continues.
• API calls, the core: query systems, process the responses.
• Standard connectors: ready-made connections to Outlook, for example. With rough edges: you can’t connect a different account per flow. If you want to work from several flows with several mailboxes, you’ll notice during testing that you need a separate API connection through Custom Actions.
• Custom Agent steps: a flow can also let something interpret. A Custom Agent takes over as a single step at the point where if-then no longer suffices.

The biggest difference from ZIS isn’t on the feature list: there’s a UI. Building, adjusting, and debugging happen visually instead of in JSON definitions. Maintenance moves from the specialist back to the admin team. In exchange, instead of the free label ZIS carried, there’s a usage limit. It’s set generously, but it exists, and it belongs in your planning.

Would I still build ZIS today?

No, and without a back door. For anything new, Action Flows are the standard route: more intuitive to build and to run, and powerful enough for what used to require the detour. ZIS is probably no longer needed.

And the existing builds?

That leaves the question of the ZIS constructs already running. Nobody rebuilds a stable flow for fun. But two things argue against simply forgetting about them.

First, maintenance: in ZIS, every future change stays manual work in the JSON. If you have to touch an existing flow anyway, you’re better off rebuilding it as an Action Flow right then instead of patching it further. The change is the natural moment to migrate.

And second, a question neither you nor I can answer: how long Zendesk keeps the service running at all. Nothing has been announced. But a tool with no UI, whose jobs its successor has taken over, is not something a vendor maintains forever. If you’re still running ZIS today, you should at least have a sketch of the replacement in the drawer: the rebuild should happen on a plan, not under time pressure, in case the plug gets pulled one day.

Where it fits on the map

Deterministic flows belong in Action Flows today; that includes almost everything that used to run through ZIS. Where a flow has to interpret rather than just process, the field of Custom Agents begins. The decision aid for that is in the blueprint Flow Builder, Action Flows, Advanced, or Custom Agent.