AI IT help desk solutions use intelligent conversational AI to resolve tier-1 tickets automatically, including standard troubleshooting issues, software access provisioning, password resets, and more.

Organizations are increasingly turning to these solutions to address several key challenges:

• As organizations grow, IT teams are asked to support an increasing number of employees (without a corresponding increase in IT headcount). In other words, the ratio of IT staff to employees shrinks, forcing IT teams to find ways to support more people with the same resources.
  
  

• IT teams risk falling short of SLAs and performance metrics as ticket volumes outpace team growth. Even worse, high-priority issues can get buried under an avalanche of routine requests, causing critical problems to go unresolved.
  
  

• SaaS sprawl creates an administrative nightmare. Managing access controls, approvals, and permissions across hundreds of applications — while handling constant employee onboarding, role changes, and departures — adds significant overhead to already stretched IT teams. We explore this issue (and others) in a recent podcast with Jay Srinivasan, co-founder of atSpoke, a former IT ticketing company that Okta acquired.

Below, we'll examine the leading solutions that address these challenges, starting with our own tool, Risotto. 

What You'll Find in This Article

This article focuses primarily on ITSM-focused AI help desk software designed for internal IT support. Towards the end, we'll also cover two traditional AI help desk platforms that excel at automating customer service, if you’re also interested in that use case.

1. Risotto

AI IT Help Desk for Internal Support

Risotto stands apart as the first AI IT help desk platform purpose-built to deliver genuinely helpful, conversational support and intelligent multi-step troubleshooting. It works directly within Slack while managing the entire ticket lifecycle through bi-directional sync with Jira (or Freshservice or Zendesk). 

Most IT teams using Risotto achieve 20-30% automation rates, while teams handling high volumes of access requests can reach up to 60% (read case study).

Up next, we’ll discuss:

• The firsthand frustrations that led us to build Risotto

• Risotto's key features and capabilities 

• A step-by-step overview of how Risotto works, from initial request to resolution

• 3 examples demonstrating Risotto's answer quality

• How Risotto automates software access, including approvals and time-based flows

• Backend configuration options, including RBAC rules, customizable approval workflows, and more. 

Risotto Was Born From Firsthand Frustration with Other AI IT Help Desk Solutions

Prior to building Risotto, our co-founder Alex led IT engineering at high-growth companies like HelloSign and Gusto, where he evaluated dozens of AI help desk solutions that claimed to revolutionize IT support. Instead, each fell short in critical ways:

🚫 Existing tools promised intelligent AI automation but simply returned generic knowledge base links, instead of understanding employee questions and providing contextual, helpful answers.

🚫 They couldn't engage in natural back-and-forth troubleshooting, hitting a wall when employees replied, "That didn't work, now what?" with no ability to ask follow-up questions or adapt their approach.

🚫 They forced employees out of their natural Slack workflows into clunky interfaces while offering poor Jira integration that required manual copying of conversation logs and updating ticket statuses in multiple places. 

🚫 They couldn't automate common tasks like software access requests, password resets, and more. For example, when someone asked "Can I get access to MS Office?" the bot might create a ticket, but human agents still had to manually check role-based permissions, provision the access, set time limits, remember to revoke it later, and so on. 

We Built the Tool We Wished Existed 

We built the AI IT help desk platform we desperately wished existed during our years in the trenches — one that actually delivers on the ambitious promises others make but don’t fulfill:

❇️ Human-Like Conversations with Multi-Step Troubleshooting

Risotto engages in natural back-and-forth conversations like an experienced IT team member would. 

It asks intelligent, clarifying questions tailored to each situation, like "What conference room are you in?" for AV issues, or "Is this a personal device or company laptop?" for network problems. Then it guides employees through step-by-step solutions, adapting its approach based on their responses. 

When someone says, "I tried that and it still doesn't work," Risotto continues troubleshooting with follow-up questions and alternative solutions, or escalates to your IT team when needed.

This approach delivers measurable results: 

• Fundrise Case Study: Risotto automated nearly 60% of all IT support tasks.
  
  

• Hazel Health Case Study: Within the first few months of switching to Risotto, Hazel Health saw deflection rates jump from 3-5% to over 20%. 
  
  

• Retool Case Study: The prior SLA for solving support issues was 2 days, but Retool is now averaging an SLA of under 1 day.
  
  

• Vidyard Case Study: Risotto automatically resolves or handles initial triage for 56% of the IT team’s support tickets.

❇️ Continuous Learning from Every Interaction

When your IT team resolves tickets in Slack, Risotto automatically captures that knowledge and adds it to its database. When similar issues arise in the future, Risotto can provide the same solutions without requiring human intervention. Your team's daily troubleshooting work continuously builds Risotto's knowledge base, reducing the need to create documentation manually. Our motto is, "Never answer the same question more than once".

"With Risotto, instead of constantly writing new documentation, our team can simply answer questions, and Risotto learns as we go. It's like having an AI teammate that gets smarter every day without any extra effort from us."

- Phillip Rickett, VP of IT, Fundrise

“The more we use Risotto, the smarter it gets, that’s what makes it different from every other tool we’ve tried".

- Peter Hadjisavas, Head of IT at Hazel Health

❇️ Seamless Integration with Slack and Jira

Risotto meets employees exactly where they're already working — in Slack — eliminating the friction of learning a new interface. But the magic happens behind the scenes. Risotto's IT agent ensures every ticket is opened correctly. The agent also categorizes the ticket and automatically routes and assigns it to the right department. Everything syncs bi-directionally with Jira (or Freshservice or Zendesk) in real-time.

“We wanted to implement more standardization and automation in our help desk, but there wasn’t an easy way in Slack without clunky custom work. Risotto helped us do that”. 

- Vergil Smith, IT Manager at Vidyard

“We want AI to seamlessly fit into our team’s daily operations, meeting our users where they already work… Risotto’s minimal operational overhead and integration into Slack has enabled us to achieve exactly that.”

- Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

❇️ Fully Automated Software Access Workflows

Risotto transforms software access from a manual nightmare into an intelligent, automated workflow that works directly in Slack. It can also integrate seamlessly with your existing identity provider, like Okta or Google Workspace. 

For sensitive applications, Risotto automatically routes approval requests to the designated managers with full context about what's being requested and why. Risotto can also provision temporary JIT (just-in-time) access that gets revoked automatically after a specified time period.

All access activities are logged automatically to provide audit trails for compliance purposes.

“When a team member asks, ‘How do I get access to Hightouch?’ they’re not looking for a link or a document; they need immediate, actionable assistance… Risotto intelligently understands the intent behind the request. It confirms existing permissions, coordinates necessary approvals proactively, and automatically provisions access upon approval. This automation significantly speeds up provisioning and improves user satisfaction.”

- Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

“Sending a compliance report from Risotto with all of the tickets tagged correctly - that’s so much easier, it’s definitely made audits a far less stressful experience.”

- Vergil Smith, IT Manager at Vidyard

How Risotto Works: A Step-by-Step Overview

Here's how Risotto handles IT support from initial request to resolution:

Step 1: Employee Requests Help in Slack

Employees ask for help directly in Slack — either by DMing Risotto or posting in a designated channel. 

Example: "I'm in the conference room having trouble with the camera, can you help?"

Note: While the above example displays Risotto's default branding for demonstration purposes, our AI agent can be completely customized to match your company's unique branding. As Charlie Verrey, IT Manager at Retool, explained: "You want to have something that's familiar, and Risotto's custom branding allowed us to do that." (Read full case study). 

Step 2: Automated Ticket Lifecycle Management (Bi-Directional Sync with Jira) 

The moment a Slack message is sent, Risotto automatically handles all the backend work: creating a Jira ticket (or Freshservice or Zendesk), generating a title, categorizing the issue, applying relevant tags, routing it to the appropriate department, and starting the initial triage process. Everything syncs bi-directionally between Slack and your existing ticketing system automatically, saving IT teams hours of administrative work each week.

Note that while Risotto can augment your ticketing system, it can also BE the ticketing system. Either way works!

Step 3: Intelligent Problem-Solving 

In the below example, Risotto searches through knowledge bases and provides intelligent, multi-step troubleshooting assistance. (Note: Risotto can also perform automated actions like granting software access with role-based and time-based controls, which we'll cover later.)

Notice the intelligent back-and-forth troubleshooting in this conversation:

Andrew sends a question: “I’m in the conference room having trouble with the camera, can you help?”

Risotto asks for clarification: Instead of providing a generic response that might not apply to Andrew's specific situation, Risotto asks: "Which conference room are you in?"

Andrew provides context: "Conference room B"

Risotto delivers a targeted solution: 

“Here are some steps you can try to fix the camera in Conference Room B:

1. Make sure the camera’s USB is plugged into the correct USB port (often labeled for AV use). 

2. Try unplugging the camera’s USB cable and plugging it back into the same port. 

3. Restart your Zoom, Teams, or Meet session and check if the camera works after rejoining. 

4. If it still doesn’t work, unplug the camera's power cable and plug it back in, and then try again [1] [2]” 

Notice these aspects of Risotto’s response quality:

❇️ Multi-step troubleshooting: Rather than immediately dumping a "Camera Troubleshooting Guide" with 20 steps covering every possible scenario, Risotto engages in the kind of thoughtful, contextual dialogue you'd expect from your most experienced IT team member. 

• Risotto understands that "conference room camera issues" could mean dozens of different problems with different solutions. A camera problem in Conference Room A (which might need the HDMI cable reconnected) requires different troubleshooting than Conference Room B (which has a known issue with specific USB ports). 
  
  

• Instead of making the employee wade through irrelevant information, Risotto asks the right clarifying question to provide laser-focused assistance.

❇️ Conversational and digestible: Responses feel like getting help from a knowledgeable colleague, not reading a technical manual. Information is broken into logical steps with clear formatting that's easy to follow. 

❇️ Transparent sourcing with reference links: Every suggestion includes numbered reference links [1] [2] that lead directly to the source material — whether that's an official knowledge base article, a previous Slack ticket where IT solved this exact problem, and so on. No black box mystery about where answers come from.

Step 4: Risotto Resolves the Issue or Escalates It to the Appropriate Agent 

Resolution Scenario: When an employee confirms success (e.g., "Thanks, that worked!"), Risotto can automatically close the ticket as successfully solved. (IT agents can also close tickets easily using the ✅ emoji) . Additionally, they can use the ✍️ emoji to automatically convert the successful resolution into a knowledge base article for future reference. 

Escalation Scenario: If the employee replies, "I tried those steps but the camera still isn't working," Risotto recognizes that it has applied all relevant solutions from its knowledge base and past ticket resolutions. Rather than repeating the same advice or guessing with untested solutions, it seamlessly escalates it. 

This is what intelligent escalation looks like: Risotto analyzes the issue (camera problems in a conference room) and automatically determines the correct department. It escalates the issue to the AV team and tags Amanda, who it knows handles camera equipment based on her past ticket assignments. 

The full chat shows Andrew's original question, Risotto's troubleshooting attempts, and Andrew's response that the steps didn't work, giving Amanda complete context to jump in immediately without asking, “What have you tried already?"

Amanda responds: "Hey Andrew, I'll be right there to check it out." 

The moment Amanda responds, Risotto’s agent automatically assigns her to the ticket in Jira, and all subsequent messages and ticket updates sync automatically between Slack and Jira. No manual copying or duplicate data entry required.

3 Examples Demonstrating Risotto's Answer Quality

To further illustrate how Risotto delivers genuinely helpful assistance, let's briefly look at three examples:

Example #1: Combining Knowledge Sources for Complete, Current Answers

When employees ask questions, Risotto searches multiple knowledge sources at once. It doesn’t just pull information from your formal documentation (e.g., Notion, Confluence, etc.), but also combines it with insights from past Slack tickets where your team solved similar issues.

Risotto also prioritizes information based on how current it is. Your official documentation might be 3 months old, while a Slack conversation from last week contains important updates or clarifications. Risotto recognizes when Slack information is more current and intelligently combines both sources — using the up-to-date details from Slack while incorporating still-relevant information from your formal documentation.

The result: When updates occur, employees get accurate information that reflects current procedures — not outdated steps that no longer work.

Example #2: Understanding Context Changes & Handling Curveball Questions 

The scenario:

Andrew asks: "How can I get an employee badge?"

Risotto provides standard new employee badge instructions.

Andrew clarifies: "I actually already have a badge and just left it at home. Can I get a temporary one?"

How other tools handle this: Most tools would repeat the same new employee process because they only match keywords like "badge" and "get." They can't understand that the context has completely shifted.

Risotto's approach: It recognizes this is no longer about badge creation — it's about temporary access for an existing employee. Instead of repeating the original answer, it provides the appropriate solution for the new context.

Risotto's intelligent response: "Yes, if you forgot your badge at home, you can visit the reception desk to obtain a temporary day badge. You will need to present a photo ID to receive it."

This demonstrates true conversational intelligence that adapts to context changes, not just keyword matching.

Example #3: Screenshot Recognition 

• The scenario: Andrew uploads a screenshot showing an error message and asks, "Can you help with this issue?" with no other context.
  
  

• Risotto's capabilities: Using image recognition, it identifies this as an AWS VPN connection issue and responds: "We no longer use AWS VPN for network access. Instead, you should sign in to Cloudflare and try connecting again."
  
  

• The impact: Instead of IT teams manually answering weeks of repetitive "My VPN isn't working" tickets after system migrations, Risotto handles these questions automatically from day one.

Risotto Automates Software Access (Including Approvals and Time-Based Flows)

Beyond answering questions, Risotto transforms one of IT's most time-consuming tasks: managing software access requests. It handles the entire workflow automatically — from initial request to provisioning and deprovisioning. 

You easily configure the access rules and approval workflows in Risotto's backend, and our platform ensures every request follows your organization's security policies while maintaining complete audit trails for compliance requirements.

Risotto handles three types of access requests automatically:

1. Approval-Based Access 

When Andrew requests access to Amplitude, Risotto immediately asks for a reason: "What do you need Amplitude access for?" 

When Andrew explains, "I need to create reports for sales," Risotto doesn't just file this away — it automatically creates a properly categorized ticket, logs the business justification for audit compliance, and sends a contextual approval request to Andrew's manager with full details about what's being requested and why. 

The manager receives a clean Slack message: "Andrew Baker is requesting Amplitude access for creating sales reports. Do you approve?" One click approves the request, and Risotto instantly provisions the access.

2. Time-Based Access

When Andrew requests MS Office access, Risotto immediately asks, "Why do you need access, and for how long (minimum 1 hour, maximum 21 days)?"

Once approved, Andrew automatically receives access for the specified time period, and Risotto revokes it when the time expires — no manual intervention required. Every step is automatically logged, creating detailed audit trails that show exactly when access was granted, used, and revoked.

3. Self-Service Access 

For low-risk applications, Risotto enables instant self-service access. When Andrew requests Lucidchart, Risotto asks, "Do you need Standard or Read Only access?"

Based on your pre-configured rules, read-only access might get approved instantly, while standard access may require manager approval. In addition, Risotto supports multiple license types and can clarify access with employees before granting it.

Seamless Integration with Your Existing IdP 

Risotto integrates with your existing identity provider, such as Okta. You can easily import your current applications and access rules in just a few clicks:

Once imported, you'll see all your applications in a centralized dashboard. For each application, you can configure custom access rules and approval workflows.

Managing Approvals in Risotto 

Risotto supports customizable approval workflows for organizations with complex requirements. For example, you can:

• Configure sequential approvals (approvals will be requested in order) or broadcast approvals (approval will be requested from all users at the same time).
  
  

• Use "all-of" logic (requiring all approvers to approve) or "any-of" logic (any single approver can approve).

These examples just scratch the surface, and Risotto can accommodate virtually any approval workflow your organization requires. 

Interested in Learning More? 

Schedule a demo call — we'll explore your specific needs and show you how Risotto can help your team.

2. Moveworks

Moveworks can be used as an AI IT help desk software, and some of its key features and functionality include: 

• Agent Builder Platform: Offers Creator Studio for developers to build custom AI agents with natural language processing capabilities and automations with minimal coding through an intuitive interface.
  
  

• AI Assistant: An AI bot that can reason and execute employee requests autonomously.

• Advanced Enterprise Search: Search across multiple knowledge bases, files, and systems to find relevant information instantly.
  
  

• Ticket Management: Automatically categorizes, routes, and prioritizes tickets to the appropriate service desk teams, reducing repetitive tasks. 
  
  

• Multi-Platform Integration: Integrates with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams

3. Aisera 

Aisera is a generalist AI platform designed to automate processes across multiple business functions, including HR, Finance, Procurement, and so on. While it can be used as an internal AI IT help desk, it wasn't built from the ground up to support IT like Risotto. 

Some of Aisera’s key features and functionality include:

• Agentic AI Copilot: An autonomous AI assistant that streamlines tasks with minimal human intervention.
  
  

• Domain-Specific Intelligence: Leverages specialized language models trained for specific business functions like IT, HR, Finance, etc., to provide contextually accurate responses.
  
  

• 3,000+ Pre-Built Workflows: Offers an extensive library of ready-to-use AI-driven automation workflows.
  
  

• Multi-Platform Integration: Integrates with 500+ enterprise applications, including ServiceNow, Atlassian Jira, BMC, and more.
  
  

• Proactive Notification System: Sends automated, personalized alerts for software renewals, hardware upgrades, system outages, and more based on employee preferences and work patterns.

4. Glean 

Glean is an AI work platform. While it can be configured to function as an AI IT help desk tool through its customizable AI agents, it's exceptionally challenging to customize the platform to provide intelligent, contextual answers and achieve the sophisticated IT support functionality Risotto offers out-of-the-box.

Some of Glean’s key features and functionality include:

• AI Agents: Create and manage AI agents at scale across departments with enterprise-grade governance controls.
  
  

• Agent Library: Explore a library of pre-built agent templates to help you get started faster. 
  
  

• Glean Assist: A generative AI chatbot assistant that's by your side to answer questions, create content, and more. It utilizes internal company data and external web information.
  
  

• Glean Search: AI-powered enterprise search capabilities to help you quickly find the answers you need. 

5. Zendesk 

Zendesk is an AI service desk software that excels at automating customer support. Some of its key features and functionality as an AI tool include:

• Autonomous AI Agents: Trained on billions of customer interactions, and can independently solve complex issues via live chat. This increases response times and improves customer satisfaction.  
  
  

• AI-Powered Knowledge Base: A dynamic content system that automatically generates, organizes, and updates information while analyzing customer queries to suggest relevant articles using artificial intelligence.
  
  

• Transcription and Summarization: Turn your customer support team’s phone call transcriptions into concise summaries.
  
  

• Advanced Analytics and Reporting: Explore detailed performance metrics, monitor service quality, and improve decision making and customer experience. 

6. HelpDesk 

HelpDesk is a great AI help desk software and ticketing system that excels at automating customer service. They offer great pricing, and some of HelpDesk’s key features and functionality to automate support processes include: 

• Pre-designed templates: Explore predesigned workflows for common issues, such as “Send a follow-up”, where if a ticket is pending for 3 days, a follow-up message will be sent automatically. 
  
  

• AI ticket summaries: Get a useful summary of the subject, issue, solution stage, next steps, and more. 
  
  

• AI tag suggestions: AI automatically suggests the best tags to apply, which helps save time on this routine task. 
  
  

• Text Tone: Agents can easily optimize their message to match the brand tone.
  
  

• AI similar tickets: Easily explore past tickets and save time by identifying what has worked before.

Interested in Learning More About Risotto? 

Risotto is the first AI IT help desk platform purpose-built to deliver genuinely helpful, conversational support, intelligent multi-step troubleshooting, continuous learning from your team's interactions, software access automation, and a seamless Slack-to-Jira workflow right out of the box.

To learn more, we invite you to:

• Visit our site

• Schedule a demo call — we'll explore your specific needs and show you how Risotto can help your team.