Building a Gen AI ready
Workforce: Preparing
IT teams for the future
of Tech Support

One common thing to every business leader is their desire to use Generative AI in their business processes.

Given that customer-facing functions can derive maximum process efficiency, tech support is also a promising niche for IT leaders who want to transform their existing processes.

The tediousness of managing existing workflows, especially resetting passwords, unlocking accounts, rebooting devices, and restoring files, takes away IT agents' acumen for handling repetitive tasks, forcing them to make mistakes and preventing them from working on critical problems.

Surprisingly, generative AI removes the existing automation challenges from service or IT help desks.

IDC claims that businesses can drive $3.4 from the investment of $1 in generative AI services.

IT staff can work much faster with Generative AI workflows, which otherwise take longer to address routine tasks with existing automation features. Besides, your IT teams spend more time on high-value tasks and create tech-support innovations.

But did you know that deploying Generative AI can be costly if you are less careful about upskilling your people?

Your genAI ambitions for tech support equally rely upon how your people can use this nascent technology properly and help you solve what you aim to achieve.

Giving access to generative AI solutions is only the tip of the ice. Preparing your team to be GenAI-ready and finally achieving readiness is key to preparing your IT staff for future tech support.

How can GenAI help IT staff to augment workflow automation?

GenAI IT support for productivity and efficiency

According to Slack, a help desk receives an average of 20 calls per person per year. In addition to the growing challenge to help desks, password resets constitute 40% of the help desk tickets.

Unfortunately, the existing help desk automation lacks full capability and solves the repetitive issues completely.

Generative AI dramatically augments automation capabilities andtransforms tech support for your IT staff.

  • Self-service is twice as fast as you could expect. Your employees can applylarge language model searches to their queries and find answers quickly without spending too much time on documents.
  • Agents are more efficient in triaging tickets, coordinating responses, and mitigating real-time issues faster than earlier. They can use AI suggestions to communicate and reduce the involvement of higher tiers.
  • Knowledge management is easier as IT leaders can quickly harness rich insights into the service desk interactions and unique solutions provided to the users. This gives access to a wealth of information to build knowledge articles for self-service automation.
  • Rapid delivery of accurate responses also improves the problem-solving capabilities of employees and agents in less time. This allows businesses to increase productivity and efficiency and reduce mundane activities.

Challenges to adopting Generative AI applications for the workforce

GenAI IT support challenges

No one can deny the super prowess of Generative AI for customer-facing problems. Yet, like any new technology, it presents some major challenges for industry geeks to adapt and adopt.

Aversion to a sudden change

Difficulties with GenAI-related changes

Picture an unusual scenario where your people find themselves misfit to use biometrics for attendance, and they return to manual work.

In this scenario, you continue to have the hurdle despite embracing a change.

Your people continue to follow the same old practices, and psychologically, their minds prefer the mechanisms they are used to.

Things are the same with generative AI changes.

People get carried away with the hype around this new technology, which, though it unlocks huge potential, is nascent.

A real-world implementation can draw huge expectations until only when your people are ready to adopt the technology.

It takes time for your people to learn certain skills, boost awareness, and finally adapt to the changes to derive their benefits.

Fear of being replaced

GenAI fear of being replaced

There is always an existing human intuition against anything new that needs to be implemented in the workplace.

This isn’t a new assumption that people suddenly start reacting to new technology. History continues to observe this kind of mental state of people at work.

From desktop computers to the Internet, every leap in technological innovation raises concerns about unemployment or threats to human craft and skill. MIT Technology outlines the facts in its whitepaper.

When you consider generative AI deployment, user adoption isn’t easy.

Your people can be critical of the goodness of the technology and may create a hostile environment for the technology to thrive.

Cultural constraint

Cultural constraint of GenAI IT support

Cultural factors play an important role in driving the success of the implementation of new technologies.

If an organization is used to a certain style of working or managing processes, it may fear failure because its people are reluctant to adjust to unique changes.

Ethical concerns

GenAI IT related ethical concerns

It is not hidden that Generative AI can be too risky if appropriate governance is not in place.

If you are too reckless to comply with data governance, your people could face challenges such as biases, misinformation, and data breaches.

Certainly, these hurdles can prevent your people from being genAI-ready and let you drive generative AI success.

Overcome the challenges of encouraging GenAI readiness strategies for IT staff

Overcome GenAI IT challenges for IT support

To be successful with your generative AI ambitions, you must know that your people—the humans at the center of generative AI implementations and success—must possess a certain level of understanding and ethical awareness.

Forrester suggests that organizations must boost their people’s AIG or artificial intelligence quotient in order to drive generative AI success.

Note that giving access to generative AI tools rarely constitutes success. Rather, it does so by helping your people upskill, learn, and apply the right ways to use generative AI at work.

What’s the right way to help your people scale upskilling for generative AI?

Build a leadership team for your vision and strategy

Leadership team development for GenAI IT support for productivity and efficiency

People just get over the surface knowledge about generative AI, much like what they know from snippets of social media posts or community discussions.

Since every business varies by function, their use cases can be different and comprehensive in nature.

For example, if your generative AI ambitions are to improve tech support processes, workflows can be varied.

With regard to your tech support needs, you must build a strategy that works for your purpose.

  • Plan your GenAI strategy

The first step is to build a leadership team that can ideate what is necessary to add to your strategy and successfully achieve it.

You can start by:

  • 1. Combining every stakeholder and capturing essential insights can improve your approach to implementing genAI use cases.
  • 2. Looking into a variety of workflows in which your service desk users and human agents interact every day.
  • 3. Exploring some more opportunities to increase efficiency for the IT help desks.
  • Encourage adoption through continuous interaction

Regularly discuss and convey to your people that GenAI cannot devalue human strength; it can help empower people with their respective tasks across IT support.

Help develop generative AI understanding for tech support

Generative AI is a tough discipline that is new to the world. It requires skills and learning so your people can use it better for tech support cases.

To improve Generative AI understanding, you need to understand the following matters:

Generative AI skills:

GenAI skills for IT support efficiency

GenAI is a broad discipline that covers areas such as learning tricks to create codes, implementing programming concepts, and more.

All of these can have backend features. The frontend technicality is to

Interact with GenAI chatbots

Your people must have the easiest way to interact with a generative AI interface. A combination of conversational AI embedded with Generative AI provides the right template for your people to interact easily.

Given Generative AI’s NLU capabilities for multilingual queries, your users can easily interact with their preferred language.

However, you must ensure that your tech support workflows have the embedded capability to understand multilanguage.

On top of it, you must ensure the following things:

  • Personalized responses: Your users can find personalized responses to their IT support problems.
  • Consolidated responses: Prepare knowledge articles with domain-specific use cases so your people can find information to resolve their productivity challenges.
  • Agent handoffs: You must prepare workflows for scenarios lacking proper information to help your users and guide them to get help from agents.

Soft Skills:

You must help your people build soft skills. The ability to communicate and interact with various stakeholders is significant to preparing your IT staff for tech support success.

What soft skills do your people need to prepare for a generative AI ecosystem?

GenAI IT soft skills for IT support efficiency
  • Communications: It is essential that your people know effective communication techniques to connect with developers and other stakeholders regarding generative AI processes. If they communicate properly, you can address future challenges hindering GenAI's success. To help them develop generative AI-related communications specific to your domain, you can create SOPs and knowledge bases that define objectives, help them understand what’s not working properly, and put them in the correct order.
  • Problem-solving: Working with Generative AI tools or workflows can present challenges. Your people must think creatively to find a solution. Sticking to your purpose rather than diverting from it can help your team find solutions and prepare for the future.
  • Ethical thinking: A generative AI solution can exhibit characteristics that violate ethics, fairness, and transparency. You must train your system to avoid unethical questions. Also, your people must adopt ethical reasoning to help eliminate the probability of data breaches and privacy violations.
  • Empathy: AI lacks empathy. You can train your model with data that shows examples of empathy. Your developers or other stakeholders need to know what your help desk users prefer and what can improve their experiences. By having appropriate knowledge articles on empathy scenarios, you can ensure your people derive the best value from your generative AI interfaces.

Embracing these soft skills in your people and developers can help you encourage them to adhere to generative AI rules and adopt this technology faster.

Focus on building hard skills

GenAI IT hard skills for IT support productivity and efficiency

Generative AI is about building a chatbot with large language properties and understanding NLP and NLU. It requires many technical or hard skills.

Let’s see what essential hard skills your people must have to encourage GenAI adoption for tech support easily.

  • Prompt engineering: A generative AI interface delivers answers based on prompt engineering. It can be challenging for your people not to be able to find answers to their prompts. It is essential that you train your model appropriately with prompts that work specifically for your business's use cases for IT support.There are some specific things you can follow to improve responses.
  • Be clear and specific about prompts: Prepare correct and contextual prompts specific to your use cases while training your model or building your workflows.
  • Experiment with multiple variations: The GenAI interface must understand various prompts with similar contexts and deliver accurate answers. Create variations and test to validate the response accuracy.
  • Test your prompts: Answers can often be incorrect. Test prompts so your users can expect accurate answers and develop an interest in Generative AI solutions.
  • Identify biases and limitations: Your people expect that GenAI-powered answers are accurate and comprehensive no matter the type of IT-related questions. Also, check your Generative AI interface to ensure it gives fair responses regardless of gender or other factors. Once you ensure your system delivers accurate answers, it can build user trust and engagement.
  • Continuous improvements through human oversight: Do not just build your workflows with generative AI and leave them with your people. You must build a feedback loop with human oversight. If any anomalies are detected, your user can pass them to the team for immediate action and improvement implementation.

Prioritize risks and awareness

 Priority of risk and awareness for GenAI IT support

Generative AI is subject to biases and risks. Many companies have faced data breaches and implemented steps to curb the threat to their organizational reputations.

Here is what you can do to prevent GenAI threats:

  • Create SOPs and policies for GenAI awareness: Give access to SOPs so that your people learn how to use the GenAI interface correctly and avoid inputting unhealthy or illegitimate queries.
  • Keep humans in the loop: You must have humans in the loop to keep a tab on user interaction and ensure you maintain compliance with fairness and transparency. Also, a real-time alert should be implemented to flag off unbiased activities from the interface.

Instilling these necessary traits of generative AI-readiness into your people can help you prepare your people.

These are time-consuming traits to develop. Just giving access to generative AI properties is not enough to reap the expected results.

Remember to carefully plan your strategy and help your people learn GenAI technicalities for timely readiness.

How can Workativ help you prepare for GenAI readiness?

IT support is a critical area to ensuring that your business runs smoothly.

Generative AI capabilities are integral to enhancing your people's tech support. If you wait to act now, you may risk losing significant business values and growth potential.

What has been enacted above to improve GenAI readiness is useful for your team.

With regards to implementing a simplified process to build a genAI-ready workforce for your IT support, Workativ can greatly help.

Workativ is a no-code chatbot builder, allowing businesses to implement GenAI-powered workflows instantly for IT support use cases.

The best thing about Workativ is that it helps you prepare your IT staff for the future of tech support with genAI readiness.

Here’s how you can build a genAI-ready workforce for IT support.

GenAI IT support features and benefits
  • 1. Ease-of-use: Workativ is a no-code platform with an intuitive chatbot builder. If your IT support use cases are ready, you can launch instantly using a conversational AI interface.
  • 2. Knowledge AI integration: Knowledge AI integration: It is an LLM-powered component that uses knowledge bases to implement ChatGPT-like searches and improve information retrieval speed. Enabling the Knowledge AI feature inside the dialog flow allows you to leverage large language model capability and enhance tech support.
  • 3. Intuitive self-service for user adoption: Intuitive self-service for user adoption: Worktiv’s genAI-powered workflows can easily sync with the communications channels where your people love to work— Teams or Slack. By reducing your people's learning curve and allowing them to adjust easily to GenAI architecture, you can expect to drive efficiency rapidly while driving your people to become genAI-ready.
  • 4. End-to-end security: End-to-end security: To ensure data correctness and response accuracy, all it takes is preparing fool-proof knowledge articles for IT support use cases. Workativ manages the majority of the security for GenAI processes. We configure essential features inside our bot to help eliminate biases, misinformation, or hallucinations.

Workativ unlocks the easiest ways to build an effortless strategy and helps you prepare your IT staff for future tech support.

While you look to build your team, Workativ helps you reduce efforts and efficiently achieve your goals.

If you want to gain a competitive advantage by encouraging generative AI readiness in your workforce, get in touch with Workativ today.

Schedule a demo to learn about generative AI capabilities for your IT support use cases.

Auto-resolve 60% of Your Employee Queries With Generative AI Chatbot & Automation.

Deepa Majumder

Content Writer

Deepa Majumder is a writer who nails the art of crafting bespoke thought leadership articles to help business leaders tap into rich insights in their journey of organization-wide digital transformation. Over the years, she has dedicatedly engaged herself in the process of continuous learning and development across business continuity management and organizational resilience.

Her pieces intricately highlight the best ways to transform employee and customer experience. When not writing, she spends time on leisure activities.