Autodesk uses conversational AI to resolve IT issues in <1 minute
To increase IT efficiency, Autodesk invested in an AI-powered chatbot that engages employees conversationally and solves problems in seconds.
Autodesk is a growing software and services company that empowers its customers to make anything — from skyscrapers to visual effects in Hollywood films.
Challenge
Autodesk’s IT team didn’t have time to focus on critical digital transformation projects.
Result
A chatbot now resolves IT issues instantly and autonomously, freeing up the IT team.
The Problem
Autodesk wanted efficient IT support
Over the last five years, Autodesk’s CIO Prakash Kota and his team have focused on efficiency. To support the company’s global workforce of over 9,000 employees, the IT team set a goal to automate repetitive tasks. With that goal in mind, Kota recognized that AI and machine learning had become critical.
But — given the ever-changing nature of IT issues, the team recognized how hard it would be to deliver a bot that would really understand employees’ IT requests, and how important it would be to keep the bot’s conversational skills up to date. For this reason, the team specified that machine learning (ML) would be needed to allow the bot to learn from its conversations and continue to provide the right resolutions, even as employee usage changes.
Kota says, “We needed to ensure that our bot would learn continually from its interaction with our employees and from our IT information sources. This was a strategic objective: Machine learning had to be at the core of the tool.”
The Solution
Moveworks’ quick answers bring quick adoption
Working with Moveworks over the course of a fast, 75-day deployment, Kota's team launched HelpBot, an AI bot — reachable in Slack and over email — that helps employees remedy issues with a median resolution time of less than one minute.
A Moveworks chatbot can resolve just about any question an employee sends its way. It can provision software, pass along policy updates, take action on existing tickets, update permissions, request or troubleshoot hardware, look up people or places, surface knowledge base articles… The list goes on. The challenge is knowing — from all these options — what will best resolve an issue.
“In choosing the initial use cases, we picked a few high-volume issue types where HelpBot could have the most instantaneous, positive impact for our employees,” says Kota. These included resetting a password, updating or adding oneself to an email distribution list, getting applications, and notifying employees when they’re eligible for a laptop refresh. Very quickly, the Autodesk service desk team saw 28% of all IT issues resolved or accelerated by HelpBot.
Now, with a growing number of employees asking the bot for help first, IT finally has time to make the organization even more efficient.
Moveworks is a quick win that a CIO can bring in to provide a frictionless user experience to their employees.
The Result
Efficient support starts with IT. Now, other teams want HelpBot.
Once HelpBot began resolving issues, IT team members gained time to focus on more important projects. “We’re setting IT agents up for success because we’ve deployed a tool that handles their repetitive workload,” says Kota. He’s pleased to see that, “Now, agents have more time to create tools, understand patterns, and augment backend systems, rather than resetting passwords one after another.”
Given the rapid employee adoption and positive employee feedback, other business units have started to approach Kota, asking if their information and services can be served via HelpBot as well. He sees this as a logical next step: “Our plan is to have HelpBot continually address new use cases so that our adoption continues to grow and HelpBot continues to take on a greater share of the repetitive tasks, so teams like mine can focus on the important stuff.”
Key Integrations
