Attention all CTOs!

Suddenly, in a very short span of time, all attention falls on Generative AI in pursuit of leveraging the best benefits from this deep learning technology in whatever way possible. Large Language Models or Generative AI have demonstrated interesting capabilities for almost every business function to transform its existing work processes.

It clearly means businesses can benefit from the bottom-line cost savings if a massive change happens across processes by removing manual processes and implementing automation to the core processes.

Let’s draw your attention to McKinsey’s Research, which estimates that the world economy could drive a whopping business value worth $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion annually.

If AI is the norm for every industry to capture a real business value, why would CTOs be left behind and display less interest in Generative AI?

The time is now to evaluate Generative AI’s core capabilities in language understanding to help with chatbot interactions and problem-solving.

In this context, Generative AI or Large Language Models or LLMsare a huge opportunity for CTOs like you to bring the most effective yet powerful tech stack to the forefront of your business functions, helping your people feel empowered and gain customer trust as a true enthusiast to innovate solutions that help both your internal users and customers.

Generative AI Service Desk helps you manage complicated business processes effectively and accelerate product development or service delivery.

The road to a successful Generative AI project for your service desk seems a little daunting due to its emergent or nascent characteristics and the shortage of skilled workforce in this field. But careful evaluation and the right partner collaboration can help you gain benefits from your Generative AI drive.

Natural language processing and language understanding are similar to what human intelligence is known for, Generative AI can easily achieve this capability depending on huge corpus of datasets or training resources building up a large language model for it to understand user’s intent, extract entity, summarize, generate content, classify, and act as a question and answer interface.

Having trained with these capabilities through pre-training, training, fine-tuning, or continuous improvement through retraining post feedback, Generative AI service desk can show promises for your business objectives.

Ramping up IT support

Employee support rarely meets the desired results for organizations that leverage legacy tech stack. Maybe sometimes, AI-led workflows can be inefficient.

Adding LLMs to your Service Desk can reimagine the whole thing across employee experience. Generative AI extends existing self-serve processes using deep learning techniques.

Say a user’s desktop mouse starts malfunctioning, and he approaches a self-serve chatbot to deliver office equipment quickly.

A Generative AI service desk can surface a related form for the user to fill in and send to the right person for approval and dispatch.

The advantage of Generative AI is that if you have a Global Office and need chat conversation flow in multiple languages to adapt to a wide variety of language-speaking workforce, you can do that.

A translation feature that Generative AI enables for the Service Desk is convenient for users not flexible with foreign languages, fetch answers in their native language only and get work done.

Here’s an example.

Besides this, employees can get help with IT support tasks such as password reset, account unlocks, etc.

For example, if your employee gets unlocked of their accounts for a particular application, such as Okta, a self-service chatbot for Okta sends an alert to the user and helps him get out of the unlocked account.

Workativ provides Generative AI solutions for multiple IT support issues to steadily handle chaos and move to production through facilitating IT support such as password resets, account unlocks, user provision, etc.

Automating HR support

New hire onboarding is a forever repetitive task that consumes productive time off HRs’ tight schedule. On the other hand, if HR is not in time for onboarding, the new hire experience is not so pleasant. Unfortunately, this can be a stemming point for employee attrition.

A service desk with Generative AI features can help automate every step of the new hire onboarding journey. A new hire can perform many onboarding tasks without any manual help.

For example, a new hire’s first job is to sign a few papers for the documentation process. If the process is not completed and submitted, a confirmation letter of salary may be put on hold.

A Generative AI service desk will shoot a dialog that contains certain significant details to fill in.

Here’s an example,

If an HR gets stuck in boardroom conferences or other tasks, service desk automation can speed up the onboarding process.

Alongside this, a self-service chatbot gives him access to company policy documents and L&D materials for self-training and upskilling. Apart from employee onboarding, a Generative AI service desk is useful to help employees know PTO balances or Tax inquiries, which sometimes take up employees' time and do not provide the right information in real-time.

Project management process automation

Generative AI service desks can complement enterprise service management by enabling organizations to manage operations for every department.

That said, Generative AI search functions powered by Knowledge AI discovery effectively enable employees to ask a question in the service desk chat interface and populate a related answer.

For example, an employee from the DevOps team wants to trace the latest progress on a site migration project for a client. All that user needs is to ask, ‘where are we on the site migration project now? A service desk will search across external applications or KB and internal KB to surface the right response.

Valid citation sources accompany all information to avoid confusion and any type of disambiguation.

Likewise, marketing and sales, finance, operations, and legal can use Knowledge AI search functionality within the Generative AI service desks and get work done faster.

Streamlining IT operations

Business leaders can gain optimized IT operations handling capabilities as they leverage the power of Generative AI service desks.

In many ways, large language models embedded in a service desk can help users unleash amazing task accomplishment.

• Triage and ticket escalation can be faster using LLM-powered prediction model capability that eliminates noise from incident communications and delivers information accuracy for the right incident team.

• ITOps teams can build unified incident communications and responses within a service desk environment to help make data-driven incident handling decisions and guide a new person to manage incidents on time effectively.

• Service desks that ingest Generative AI can give the ITOps team access to advanced data analytics capabilities to find future incident propensities and help be future incident-ready.

Flexible end-to-end conversational AI communications (content generation)

An LLM architecture enables a popular use case, content generation, by understanding the natural language inputs.

This feature doubles up a service desk’s ability to help agents create new content for dialog delivery for a user.

If a user wants to ask, ‘how can I connect with the Marketing Manager?’, an agent can prompt an LLM window to surface an automated response. Then, he can review and edit the response and send it inside the chat interface.

Content generation use cases are widely used to improve customer support services.

As we know, customer sentiment is key to effectively benefiting from customer retention by offering them personalized services.

A Generative AI service desk helps fetch customer chat history, apply classification to conversations to reveal user sentiment, and craft an appropriate and automated response, making it cordial for the user and translating the interaction into an effective ongoing relationship.

• Personalized recommendations for customers

Integrating LLM models into a service desk platform helps analyze complex patterns in human language, which simplifies understanding of nuanced user interpretations and the generation of effective recommendations to align with user preferences.

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On the other hand, searching for information from a deep sea of information i.e.,. technical documentation can be intimidating for customers or clients to reach a certain conclusion in an enterprise setting, where a website may contain hundreds of resources for a similar topic. In this scenario, LLM can understand user intent and surface the right document rather than providing links to similar documents.

Customers savor this flexibility and develop long-term advocacy for a brand.

• More flexible task management for employees

Knowledge search effectively allows internal employees to populate the right responses from Generative AI service desks. This has a direct relation to making them productive, make less repetitive iterations, make fewer mistakes in their tasks, and derive value from their efforts.

Workativ, with its service desk chatbot automation that implies KnolwedgeAI functionality to allow users to build a large language KB, helps businesses fetch real-time responses to improve task management.

Say a user needs assistance in getting added to a user group. Workativ allows workflow automation for a Generative AI-powered chatbot to automate this process instantly and provide extended employee experience.

• ROI improvement

It is an overall gain a CTO can derive from Generative AI service desks in many different ways. The most illustrative benefit is that companies can save on employee productivity by optimizing employee or agent time appropriately, saving thousands of dollars that would otherwise be wasted in lost productivity.

It is not hidden that service desk software service providers are leveraging Generative AI features inside their platforms to enable advancement in streamlining operational processes. But, off-the-shelf Generative AI models may be limited in meeting certain business expectations. That’s why CTOs need to evaluate the scope of a solution that specifies alignment with their domain-specific requirement. Hence, challenges are quite acute.

• Budget constraint

Not everyone can go for a custom Generative AI model for the service desk due to high costs for infrastructure maintenance and high computational expenses - a feat that only large enterprises can adopt.

For small-scale or average business owners, Generative AI investment could be challenging.

API-led Generative AI service desks or fine-tuned models are a cost-effective solution for CTOs. A no-code platform like that of Workativ can effectively leverage Generative AI capabilities for your service desks and reimagine user productivity.

• Lack of domain-specific data

If a company compromises on technological advances, chances are their legacy systems do not come in handy in deriving historical data across service desk operations. Without adequate data, gaining the results for streamlining service desk operations through automated workflows is a little challenging.

Workativ allows CTOs to capture Generative AI capabilities through its embedded Knowledge AI feature, making it easy to create related and relevant IT or HR support KB resources and build an efficient LLM to help with problem-solving.

• Absence of in-house technical expertise

Generative AI has very limited developer communities, and only expert AI geeks know the ins and outs of this emergent technology. Companies aiming to develop their own solutions may face a scarcity of in-house technical expertise, a valid reason to incur a high-cost project budget and delay the project.

• Generative AI inherent risks

Generative AI could put anyone at risk for being biased or generating hallucinated responses. Generative AI cannot demonstrate logical reasoning as human beings and can provide answers based on the datasets or huge corpus of data it is trained with.

It will do more harm than good if a service desk misleads or provides a hallucinated response.

In reality, CTOs or CIOs start with the project but are unable to move beyond the pilot stage. Many past references can prove these occurrences. Does that mean we should not experiment and come triumphant? Here is a set of effective lessons to follow and enable a successful Generative AI service desk project.

• Know your business-specific use cases

It should not be this way that it is effective, so we want to use it. Find where the Generative AI service desk could effectively facilitate task enablement, drive value, and improve user experience.

For example, find out if your finance department could benefit from use cases or if your software or engineering team needs an efficient tool to innovate and grow your business.

• Budget consideration through technical debt review

A custom solution is expensive. API-layered or fine-tuned solutions could be affordable. What suits your specific business needs is an important consideration in allocating budget.

It is also important to note that Generative AI helps employees work faster, focus on more critical jobs, and provide problem-solving assistance in real-time, which would expand more cost-saving opportunities in the long term for any organization.

• Choose a preferred Generative AI solution

As we already highlighted various Generative AI solutions available for customers, it is imperative to decide which solution you need to achieve AI success.

1. Open-source models such as RoBerta BERT allows users to access its core data architecture and apply coding customization to implement desired business use cases to a large extent. It is great for achieving total ownership.

2. API-led LLM models that include GPT 3.5 or Cohere are open for users to fine-tune some of its features according to business use cases to some extent only.

3. Closed LLM models such as ChatGPT Github Copilot provide no access to its data architecture and are available for users as an as-is model. Users can use these tools inside service desks or chat interfaces to improve search capabilities.

• Build a skilled GenerativeAI team

Your goal is to implement a Generative AI service desk project successfully. A team with strong technical abilities across machine learning or AI technologies can conveniently improve project progress with a continuous feedback loop and avoid mistakes that would impact the project's success.

As a CTO, your role is also to ensure you have the right talent pool for the successful implementation of the drive.

• Build quality data architecture

Operational efficiency across service desks depends on quality data that ties back to hundreds, if not, thousands of historical cases, current incidents, agent interactions, user logs, ticket volumes, actions taken to mitigate incidents or solve IT issues or HR issues, etc.

As you collect these significant datasets, you need to ensure that the data you store is relevant and accurate to use for workflow automation to streamline process efficiency improve user experience, and avoid any data that offers misinformation.

• Implement data governance

A stringent process should be in place to ensure no interactions or actions violate users' privacy or populate anything that gives rise to bias or discrimination. Prefer having a monitoring system or an alerting system to flag any risks that refer to violation of compliance with GDPR or HIPPA and expose personal data to third parties and increase the risk of reputational damage.

• Launch your Generative AI Service Desk

Whatever Generative AI solution you choose for your service desk, it is essentially important that you follow a standard procedure for your project before going live.

1. Deploy your Generative AI solution to the service desk architecture by leveraging pre-training, training, or fine-tuning capabilities.

2. Test dialog flows to evaluate how effectively a chat interface answers service desk-related questions and offers real-time help using LLM-powered KB resources.

3. Launch your LLM-powered dialog flows for your existing service desk or new platform through an API or chat interface to enable users to adopt it.

4. Gather feedback post-deployment to learn if your Generative AI service desk works as expected. User feedback provides a template to implement continuous learning and improvement and enable convenient adoption.

Businesses of all sizes are eager to experiment with Generative AI and want to gain maximum benefits for expediting business growth.

No matter if you have a budget limitation to invest in a new Generative AI service desk. You can upgrade your enterprise platform through an integration of a Generative AI chatbot using Workativ, a conversational AI platform, and transform the existing capabilities of your service desk.

• Knowledge AI search implementation through API connector allows you to connect external applications, create workflows, and leverage the power of large language models for KB searches.

• Other than external KB, you can build website KB and internal KB to simplify service desk operations.

• Hybrid NLU and reranker endpoints improve search performance and only surface relevant articles that help solve problems.

• Knowledge AI search can be seamlessly used to create dialog workflows and implement use cases for IT and HR support to ease common and low-level service desk issues. Password reset, user provision, PTO inquiries, and Tax inquiries are among those usual use cases.

• Chatbot logs provide access to advanced analytics from the Generative AI service desk, helping continuously improve performance for users.

Generative AI service desks can turn out to be an easy way for CTOs to leverage the features of large language models and optimize benefits for long-term success.

As discussed, a service desk can improve operational efficiency and make businesses resilient to outages or repetitive and manual work processes.

It makes sense for CTOs to leverage Generative AI showing so much promise to reimagine existing processes and be part of estimated global economic growth.

If you are interested in leveraging the Generative AI service desk and empowering your operational processes and resources, Workativ can help.

To learn more about the Workativ conversational AI platform and Generative AI features, schedule a demo today.