Customer behavior has experienced a whirlwind of changes due to the ongoing pandemic. And obstacles have never been lower while customers virtually connect with agents via phone, email, and texts. However, when it comes to interacting with business, points of friction are more numerous. Customers are often forced to deal with endless waits for an email response and companies often struggle to accommodate the limited availability of service desk agents during business hours. Moreover, service desk agents have soaring pressure to do more with less.

Sometimes HR managers and recruiters have a tough time finding the right candidate for a job. Can conversational AI save the day? Recruiting the right talent is one of the most challenging tasks for recruiters. On top of these responsibilities, recruiters have to develop a recruitment strategy that meets business goals, takes into consideration competitor analysis and employee satisfaction rates. In reality, managing this workload effectively is a hard task to do, that's why many companies turned to Artificial Intelligence for extra help. In one of their recent reports, Deloitte covered a use case of a multinational bank struggling to optimize the workload of hundreds of service desk agents, who support HR management processes.

As a system administrator working in technology for more than 25 years, I've provided some measure of IT support. While it's rewarding to help people, sometimes the monotony in doing so can lead to feeling unfulfilled, especially when there are better and more promising tasks afoot--if you can just find time to work on them. It's equally challenging for users and administrators to handle both support ticket platforms and the communication gaps and lags, which can hinder or impede resolutions, plunging both sides into bureaucratic red tape that lowers satisfaction all around as unresolved issues pile up. This is where artificial intelligence (AI) can play a role. AI can help to free up technology pros for more meaningful endeavors in a more streamlined, goal-driven fashion.

In a recent artificial intelligence (AI)-related HDI webinar, Roy Atkinson of HDI, Stephen Mann of ITSM.tools, and I fielded questions related to what service and support managers need to know about AI. There were some pre-planned questions plus those offered by the audience. This blog shares some of the key AI-adoption points raised and the advice that was offered. Before our panel fielded any questions, a poll was undertaken to ascertain where the attendees, and their organizations, are in their AI journey. However, as you would expect from the attendees of an AI-related webinar, they're highly likely to be more interested in AI than the average IT service desk manager.