If you're not considering AI as part of your strategy to reduce IT costs, you're leaving your money on the table. Hear me out:
There’s no question we’re operating in an uncertain environment. We’re wracked by inflation, key talent shortages, and pressure to cut costs across the board.
It’s no surprise then that service desks everywhere are under immense pressure to slash budgets, boost productivity, and ensure maximum efficiency — all while continuing to meet ever-increasing employee experience expectations.
Even in this environment, digital transformation can become an expensive line item to justify. But that’s where AI comes in.
Adding AI to your IT cost reduction strategy can help your service desk thrive in today's economy, unlocking new opportunities for growth and success while also driving an efficient, cost-effective support organization.
1. Automate service desk busy work, end to end
You're overspending on labor costs for repetitive and routine tasks that can be automated.
One of the most significant benefits of using AI is its ability to automate many time-consuming, routine, and tedious tasks. By taking care of everything from password resets to approvals to software provisioning with AI, you’ll free up employees to focus on more strategic work.
In this instance, AI not only improves productivity and offers agents the opportunity to gain higher-value skills but also reduces overall IT spend by reducing the number of tickets that agents are working on. Businesses are wasting money and talent on low-benefit, low-impact tech issues that AI can take care of. This way AI frees up your team’s time to focus on revenue-generating, meaningful tasks and providing employees with the best possible service — not busy work.
Figure 1: With AI, IT support issues, like account unlocks or software provisioning, won’t slow your team down.
2. Proactively prevent IT issues
Avoid costly disruptions from predictable IT issues with AI.
By analyzing large amounts of data, AI can monitor your IT systems for unusual patterns and trends that would be difficult for human agents to spot. This approach can help you better understand what is slowing employees down — such as a service outage or software failure — as well as what other important factors are impacting the bottom line.
Identifying potential problems before they occur allows businesses to improve the reliability and stability of their support operations by avoiding or mitigating tickets rather than reacting to them after the fact.
Figure 2: With AI, IT support issues, like account unlocks or software provisioning, won’t slow your team down.
3. Identifying service gaps saves money by reducing the time and resources required to provide support
Identifying service gaps saves money by reducing the time and resources required to provide support.
AI is perfect for analyzing vast amounts of company data and finding areas where support may be lacking. For example, AI can analyze the types of support requests that employees make, the length of time it takes to resolve those requests, and what resources exist to help that employee to figure out areas where support may be inadequate or inefficient.
With knowledge of where they’re falling short, organizations can take steps to address gaps by creating new resources or investing in new tools. With these insights, support teams can work to improve the overall quality of support and reduce the number of customer complaints or issues, ultimately reducing the time and resources required to provide support.
Figure 3: AI can filter issues intelligently, revealing the real story behind your support tickets.
4. Surface snippets from your backend support ecosystem
By connecting backend support systems, AI speeds up personalized support.
Even the most capable IT team can find it difficult to surface the best IT answer in seconds. It takes time and effort to sift through dozens of disconnected backend systems and pull a solution tailored to the employee's location, permissions, and language.
When AI has access to your knowledge bases, ITSM, HRIS, and support systems, tickets can be solved in seconds. Integrating with ServiceNow, Zendesk, Okta, Workday, Duo, Slack, and more — AI can point users to troubleshoot their own solutions by surfacing personalized information snippets. This reduces the need for labor-intensive manual work and allows for more efficient and accurate data processing.
AI can help support teams to better meet the needs of their employees — without sacrificing efficiency. By analyzing data and preferences, AI can surface solutions and services tailored to each employee — without wasting time and energy.
Figure 4: AI can pull information from any backend support system, from IT to HR to finance to facilities.
5. Support your people — all day, every day
Staffing agents around the clock costs extra. And it takes even more time and effort to ensure that the right experts are available across time zones.
AI delivers instant support 24/7, so you aren’t missing out on opportunities to maximize your people’s potential. When AI provides support around the clock, employees can get help whenever they need it, rather than waiting for support staff to be available during business hours. By resetting passwords or troubleshooting basic technical issues, AI helps to improve the overall customer experience and reduce the time and effort required to resolve support issues.
AI's ability to work 24/7 can help IT support teams provide better employee support while improving their efficiency and effectiveness. Time is money, after all!
Figure 5: AI works 24/7. If an employee is locked out of their account, they won’t have to wait hours to get help.
6. Engage in every language
Don’t pay extra for multilingual support.
Supporting employees who speak other languages can be expensive because it may be necessary to hire additional support staff who are fluent in a variety of languages. The alternative is to deploy a conventional support chatbot. But this would require your team to identify every way an employee could ask for help, train — and re-train — a generalized translation model, manually script out dozens of conversations, and then translate every resource in your knowledge base.
The usual multilingual support methods are not scalable. AI is. In fact, with AI, it’s possible to deliver near-native employee service in dozens of languages out of the box so that companies with operations in Asia, South America, and Oceania, can meet employees on their terms in a cost-effective way that doesn’t also discount experience.
Separately, AI is capable of translating information from your backend systems and ticket comments between the agents’ and users’ native languages in real time. Not manually translating thousands of knowledge articles or waiting for ticket comments to be translated can result in millions of cost and time savings.
Figure 6: AI can surface the most relevant answer to each employee in their language of choice.
7. Have thousands of conversations at once
Every back-and-forth between an employee and the IT team adds a 1.75-day delay. AI can manage the back and forth, saving IT time and money.
In this economy, fast resolution of tech issues is more important than ever. While conversational AI can instantly resolve many routine tech issues without the help desk, what about the more complex, high-touch requests that can take weeks to resolve?
Even when it can’t solve an issue outright, AI can accelerate resolution by prompting employees to provide additional info as requested by the IT team, updating employees on their tickets’ status, and nudging both IT teams and employees to take action on stalled tickets.
From a financial perspective, of course, IT organizations that don’t eliminate friction with AI are leaving money on the table. But beyond the bottom line, AI empowers IT teams to support employees at the speed of modern business.
Figure 7: AI can handle the back-and-forth communication with employees to add comments, nudge agents, check status, and cancel requests, so your help desk doesn’t have to.
8. Get requests to the right experts and approvers
Every support ticket that AI routes is time and money saved for the service desk.
Triage is the process of sorting support tickets into different priority levels based on their severity and urgency. This is typically done by support agents who review each ticket and determine how quickly it needs to be resolved.
While triaging support tickets can help improve the support team's overall efficiency, it can also be time-consuming and costly. Because it requires support staff to spend time reviewing and prioritizing each ticket, triage often takes them away from other tasks they could be working on.
AI can triage IT tickets more efficiently than a person because it can process and analyze large amounts of data quickly and accurately. For example, AI can analyze the content of each support ticket, as well as information about the employee who submitted it, to determine the priority level and the appropriate course of action. No more waiting days for help!
Figure 8: Many companies have hundreds or even thousands of assignment groups, meaning that service desk agents struggle to determine where to route issues. AI understands and routes requests to the right group.
9. Manage more than just IT support
You’re spending too much time and money on tasks across your support organization that could be automated.
AI is a versatile technology that can help employees with any question, not just IT questions. With AI, setting up PTO can be as easy as getting approved software access. Instead of filing an IT ticket or emailing the HR team, employees can simply describe any issue, just as they would to a professional, and let the AI determine and then deliver the right resource to resolve the request.
The cost savings of bringing together all support under one AI umbrella can be huge. AI can automate tedious, repetitive, and routine tasks that consume a lot of time, allowing employees to focus on more strategic and productive work. This not only improves productivity and allows employees to acquire higher-value skills but also reduces overall support costs. AI can help every support team avoid low-value tasks and provide better service to your employees and customers.
Figure 9: HR can create a wonderfully positive work environment — but only if they’re not constantly dealing with time-consuming, routine issues. AI can step in, answering questions in seconds and sending info proactively.
10. Improve continuously
The best thing about AI? Its value increases over time.
Because AI systems can learn and adapt as they are used, they can become more effective and efficient. Weeks, months, and years after deploying an AI solution, it can perform new tasks and provide new capabilities because it constantly learns from your environment. When you add a new tool to your tech stack or update a knowledge base article, AI incorporates that information, surfacing it without effort from the IT team.
Organizations that invest in AI can expect to see an increase in the value of their investment over time, resulting in reduced costs and increased efficiency, which can also increase the organization's value.
Figure 10: While every company is unquestionably unique, many use the same IT to conduct business. Thanks to Collective Learning, AI can grow as you grow, constantly adjusting as new needs arise and teams evolve.
Get the most out of your service desk with AI
These are exciting times for support teams everywhere. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, AI opens the door to massive gains.
Of course, implementing AI can be a complex and challenging process, and it's essential for businesses to carefully consider their goals and priorities before embarking on an AI project. But the potential rewards of using AI are clear: improved efficiency, productivity, and decision-making, as well as new opportunities for growth and success.
If you’re not using AI, you’re wasting money on manual, time-consuming tasks. AI can automate these processes, freeing your staff to focus on more complex and value-added projects. Let your agents handle the hard problems. AI can handle the rest. They shouldn’t waste their time on L0, L1 asks or jumping over stumbling blocks like multilingual support.
By incorporating AI into your operations, you can give your business the competitive edge — and budget — it needs to thrive in today's economy.
How Moveworks can help
Moveworks has been focused on building the world’s leading conversational AI platform for the last six years. We’re constantly innovating, plugged into the latest advances in the field, and looking for ways to improve our platform.
Today, we offer what I — and our customers — truly believe to be the best conversational AI platform:
- We understand exactly what employees need, no matter which language they use.
- We offer actionable recommendations for your support environment.
- You can implement our platform in days, not weeks or months.
No matter your industry, conversational AI from Moveworks can save your team’s resources, improving every interaction throughout their journey. Don’t just take our word for it — leading companies like Hearst and Palo Alto Networks have experienced incredible results with our platform.
Let us show you all you can get from conversational AI in a quick demo with our team.
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