Technology company IPsoft touts the advantages of integrating an AI-enabled cognitive

agent into existing IT service desk strategies in their White Paper, The Cognitive-Enabled IT

Service Desk: Driving Agent Scalability Through AI. IPsoft outlines the most daunting

challenges facing IT decision-makers, namely having IT service agents take on a higher volume

of service requests at a greater level of complexity while maintaining operating costs low.

The company claims that up until now, IT executives have tried tackling the issue by

making use of technology that increases the number of calls each individual agent can take, such

as intelligent call routing and web call back systems. However, even with the marginal increase

in overall efficiency and productivity, service desk managers have not been able to lower the

overall cost of the operation because there appears to be a bottleneck in the agents’ capability to

handle above a certain volume of queries. Because of this, it has become increasingly difficult

for IT service desk teams to hit their benchmarks with consistency, thus causing a cascading

effect of lowering morale which inevitably leads to high turnover in employees. Attempting to

retain and/or retrain employees in this kind of environment puts a serious financial burden on

businesses. Indeed, having to spend so much on human capital just to inefficiently maintain

these operational processes becomes an incredibly unenviable task.

The company sets out to solve the problem the IT service industry has in scaling the

number of successful solution outcomes in both customer-facing and employee-facing IT service

desk operations by introducing to the reader its featured product: An AI live-chat agent known as

Amelia. According the IPsoft, Amelia is able to interact like a real person without using static

scripts, is capable of discriminating between relevant and necessary data and can identify user

intent based on experience by using a proprietary machine learning algorithm.

 IPsoft lays out a two-pronged approach to the radical shift in strategy they say is needed

to break through the bottleneck mentioned above, and their product offering is well positioned to

meet the demands of both. The first approach is to focus on text chat over voice calls when

servicing requests. IPsoft cites the SDI study claiming that 75% of end users regularly use chat

for IT help desk interactions. Owing to this shift in popularity, texting and emailing has become

the go-to method of communication both inside and outside of the workplace. Furthermore, live

chatting allows for a more immediate response than traditional phone calls, thus further

increasing the scalability of successful servicing solutions.

The second approach suggested by the White Paper is to increase what they term as the

“industrialization of cognitive technologies.” In other words, make the presence of enterprise-

grade artificial intelligence technologies ubiquitous in the workplace. The main advantage of this

approach is that AI’s are not bound by physical limitations in the same way a human is.

Therefore, given enough time, the machine learning algorithm trained in natural language

processing should be able to maintain a conversation with a human user that would be

indistinguishable from a person-to-person conversation.

Overall, IPsoft’s whitepaper on their Amelia product offering is clear and concise. They

effectively communicated the market problem and provided an easy to implement strategy in

order to deal with it. Moreover, there was plenty of informational graphics that help the reader

understand the scope of the problem and exactly how their preferred method is the solution you

should choose.