The Search for a Better AI IT Chatbot

Fundrise, a financial technology company that provides individuals with direct access to private market investments in real estate, private credit, and venture capital, sought to improve their IT support through AI- driven automation. Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise, deployed a well-known AI-powered chatbot to shift IT support from reactive, ticket-based workflows to an always available support model that could handle access, answers, and approvals in real-time.

Unfortunately, the anticipated improvements never materialized. “Despite substantial effort by the Fundrise IT team, the previous chatbot solution simply didn’t deliver on its promises,” said Phillip.“We expected smarter responses, quicker resolution times, and better integration, but instead faced constant inaccuracies and frustrating limitations. The limitations led users to get answers from ChatGPT rather than using our chatbot for guidance on IT problems.”

Recognizing that the tool was not going to be a good long-term investment, Fundrise reassessed their approach and began exploring alternative solutions.After engaging with multiple vendors, they found that many offerings in the market shared similar limitations; primarily an inability to effectively combine existing documentation with real- time, dynamic knowledge updates.

When the Fundrise team first met the Risotto team, the difference in the company and their technology became immediately apparent. Phillip explained, “The first Risotto demo showed it was clearly superior to our previous chatbot. The killer feature for us was that it could effortlessly learn and capture knowledge that our team creates every day in Slack and makes it accessible through a chatbot that our team enjoys interacting with.”

Hours, Not Months: The Implementation Difference

The transition to Risotto was seamless. While the previous chatbot required support from a large sales and implementation team accompanied by months of meetings and delays, Risotto was operational within an hour, entirely implemented by Fundrise’s internal IT team.

“We accomplished nearly the same configuration with Risotto in an hour that took us months with the other company,” said Phillip. “The speed and simplicity of Risotto’s setup was a great sign that we had made a good decision.”

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

Beyond the ease of setup, Risotto quickly proved its value by solving issues soon after launch. After a month, Risotto automatically resolved 33% of Fundrise’s IT tickets and assisted in an additional 26%. In total, Risotto effectively automated nearly 60% of Fundrise’s IT support tasks, a major boost to operational productivity.

“Our auto-solve rate has improved since adopting Risotto, and it continues to get better over time,” Phillip mentioned.

Beyond Documentation: Constant Self-Improvement

While the time to value was impressive, the true transformation came from how Risotto approached knowledge management, a critical factor in Fundrise’s decision to switch solutions. Fundrise particularly values Risotto’s ability to naturally capture business-specific knowledge through everyday interactions.

“Our previous tool summarized whatever it pulled from wiki articles, it didn’t supplement responses with broader LLM knowledge or reasoning. This approach fell short because it lacked the capability to fully understand user intent or supplement answers with external knowledge” explained Phillip. “Risotto, however, synthesizes information from multiple inputs to provide context-aware, accurate, and actionable responses.”

“With Risotto, instead of constantly writing new documentation, our team can simply answer questions, and Risotto learns as we go,” Phillip also noted.

Moreover, Risotto easily incorporates external sources through its LLM capabilities, further broadening the knowledge available without additional documentation effort. “I don’t want to have to create documentation for how to remove someone from a Google group. That’s a well-documented thing. Risotto just answers it,” Phillip continued.

Risotto gave the Fundrise IT team the tools to rapidly expand the knowledge base that Risotto could leverage to answer even more questions. This was a very welcome feature for a team looking to scale efficiently that didn’t want to constantly write knowledge articles from scratch.

From Request to Access: Automating the Approval Cycle

With the knowledge management challenges addressed, Fundrise turned to another pain point: the time-consuming process of managing access requests that consumed a disproportionate amount of IT resources. A significant part of the Fundrise IT team’s workload is centered around access requests. Risotto has transformed this process, providing the Fundrise IT team with tools for automated access provisioning.

Phillip recalled their previous frustrations: “With our old chatbot, every new application required a cumbersome onboarding process through the vendor. Now, adding an application to Risotto takes just a few minutes.”

Risotto’s flexible approval workflow aligns seamlessly with Fundrise’s security posture, allowing configurations ranging from simple managerial approval to layered, tiered approvals for sensitive applications. Additionally, Risotto supports Just-in-Time (JIT) access workflows, granting temporary permissions only when needed, further enhancing security.

“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,” Phillip explained. “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.”

A Partnership Built on Collaboration and Shared Vision

The Fundrise IT team quickly noticed a significant difference when working with Risotto compared to other vendors.

The ability to interact regularly with the Risotto’s founding team has led to a close-knit relationship between Fundrise and Risotto. This has allowed both teams to quickly resolve issues, explore new technology solutions and create outcomes that have far surpassed expectations.

“It’s refreshing to work closely with the Risotto team. They genuinely care about solving our problems and improving our operations,” Phillip noted. “The level of responsiveness, speed and agility in their development cycle is outstanding. Sometimes we see updates or enhancements delivered the very same day.”

Aron Solberg, co-founder and CEO, shared the partner-first mentality with Fundrise is representative of their mission to build long-lasting relationships with IT. “At Risotto, we deeply value the collaborative partnership that we have forged with Fundrise,” Aron says. “They are one of our best customer-partners, consistently pushing us to innovate and enhance our product. We’re looking forward to seeing our partnership lead to innovation and mutual growth, reinforcing a shared vision of smarter, simpler enterprise IT.”

This partnership illustrates a powerful shift in how companies approach IT support. With nearly 60% of their support tasks now automated, Fundrise has transformed their IT team from a maintenance function into a strategic driver of organization-wide innovation. It demonstrates what’s possible when AI technology delivers on its promises: not just efficiency gains, but a fundamental reimagining of what IT teams can accomplish.