Dive Brief:
- AI automation has proved its mettle speeding up technology support service delivery, according to help-desk platform provider Fixify. Automation tools helped resolve requests sixteen times faster than tickets serviced without AI assistance, Fixify found in an analysis of more than 50,000 support tickets submitted across 30-plus organizations over 14 months.
- While automation reduced average initial response times from five minutes to four minutes, it was far more effective in the resolution phase. IT helpdesk teams took an average of 4.4 hours in ticket resolutions that were at least 75% automated compared to the roughly three days it took for teams lacking automation, Fortify found.
- “Everyone asks whether AI will make IT faster. The answer is yes — but not where people think,” Matt Peters, co-founder and CEO of Fixify, said in a release accompanying the report. “AI doesn't pick up the phone faster. It closes the loop faster.”
Dive Insight:
In the search for viable generative AI use cases, the overburdened IT helpdesk is ripe for the picking. A nagging pain point for organizations and their outsourced service providers, most support tickets follow a predictable cadence and resolution playbook, according to Fixify’s research.
IT helpdesk ticket volume was heavily weighted toward the start of the week, with nearly 45% of service requests arriving on Mondays and Tuesdays. Less than 15% of tickets were filed on a Friday, the analysis found. On an annual basis, July, September and October were the busiest months, a trend that tracks with midsummer hiring and post-vacation back-to-work periods.
Requests clustered around tasks that lend themselves to automation. More than one-quarter of tickets were simple application access requests that could be solved with an automated password reset. App assignment, permissions management and closing accounts during employee offboarding accounted for 40% of tickets and fall within the capabilities of AI automation tools.
"That concentration of request volume is exactly where automation powered by natural language shines — users describe what they do every day, and the system builds the workflow for them," Pete Silberman, co-founder and CTO of Fixify, said in the report announcement.
Service requests that are less easily automated — hardware and application troubleshooting — can nonetheless benefit from knowledge management and anomaly detection AI tools. MSPs, in particular, are under pressure to deploy AI to speed up services or face a gradual eroding of their business.
The introduction of AI into support services will be disruptive, according to CompTIA. “AI’s relationship to human effort via automating and augmenting workflows will mean many job roles will change; new job roles will emerge, and some job roles will fade,” the IT industry nonprofit trade organization said in a November report.
CompTIA added an AI Help Desk Essentials to its expansive certification portfolio in February. The certification training covers using AI to summarize and route incoming tickets, generate clarifying questions, diagnose incidents and create reusable support documentation, the organization said in the announcement.
The payoff can be significant for companies that successfully integrate AI into helpdesk functions. Nearly one-third of tickets processed by companies with 1,000-plus employees were for issues that caused work stoppages.
