When Hazel Health’s IT team found themselves functioning as the company’s human search engine, they knew something needed to change. The frustration of repetitive questions and limited automation was preventing them from focusing on strategic initiatives that could truly move the business forward.

Hazel Health provides critical telehealth services to schools, ensuring over 5 million students have access to essential medical and mental health care. With a workforce spanning from the East Coast to Hawaii, their IT team supports both corporate employees and healthcare providers working across multiple time zones.

The Challenge: Support That Scales Efficiently

For Hazel Health, the challenges were clear and pressing:

• Managing high volumes of IT requests across departments, products, and time zones

• Supporting healthcare providers who work outside standard business hours

• Maintaining quality support without expanding the IT team

• Reducing the time spent on repetitive, low-value questions

Their existing solution, a combination of JIRA Assist and Atlassian Virtual Agent, was falling short. Despite significant effort spent tweaking keyword triggers and maintaining workflows, automation rates remained disappointingly low.

After evaluating several options, Hazel Health selected Risotto as their AI-powered IT support solution. The implementation process exceeded expectations, as Peter, Head of IT at

Hazel Health, explains: “Ease of deployment was huge. We didn’t need a consultant or months of configuration. Risotto just worked.”

Beyond Chatbots: AI That Understands Context

What differentiates a true IT support transformation from just another technology implementation is the ability to understand context and intent. Hazel needed more than a bot that regurgitated knowledge articles, they needed an intelligent teammate that could understand complex questions and guide users through solutions.

Risotto provided precisely this difference. Unlike rule-based chatbots, Risotto’s AI- powered approach meant it could understand the intent behind questions, provide step-by-step troubleshooting, learn from past interactions, and consolidate support requests into a single Slack-based workflow.

The results were immediately noticeable.“Risotto started answering complex product questions even I didn’t know off the top of my head,” Peter notes. “It was pulling insights from our own past Slack conversations, surfacing knowledge that would have otherwise been buried.”

This intelligence grew over time, creating a compounding return on investment.

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

Improved Employee Experience Through Better Support

The employee experience between IT and the rest of an organization often suffers when support feels transactional and impersonal. By implementing Risotto, Hazel Health transformed this dynamic, creating a support experience that felt more like working with a knowledgeable colleague than submitting a ticket to an anonymous system.

Within the first few months of switching to Risotto, the impact was clear. “We started seeing deflection rates jump from 3-5% to over 20%, which is huge,” Peter shares. This improvement meant fewer interruptions for IT staff and faster resolutions for employees.

For Hazel Health’s healthcare providers, the benefits were particularly significant.

“What really matters is that Risotto helps our healthcare providers stay focused on patient care instead of getting stuck on IT issues,” Peter emphasizes. The 24/7 availability proved to be especially valuable for their distributed workforce: “Risotto is providing immediate answers 24/7, even when IT isn’t online. That’s a game changer.” For Hazel Health, Risotto’s HIPAA compliance was also an essential requirement and further demonstrated Risotto’s commitment to security, trust, and data privacy.

The transition from their previous solution was remarkably smooth. “We’ve completely replaced JIRA Assist with Risotto, it was a seamless transition,” Peter confirms, highlighting how quickly the team adapted to the new system.

Beyond IT to a Single Enterprise Support Funnel

Just as contracts represent relationships between parties, support tools represent the relationship between service providers and those they support. Recognizing this, Peter quickly saw Risotto’s potential beyond traditional IT boundaries.

Peter explains his vision that extends to HR, Finance, Security, and Product Support teams. This vision aligns with what Risotto calls “A Single Enterprise Support Funnel” - creating a single, intelligent entry point that manages interactions across departments. Looking ahead, Hazel Health is exploring ways to:

• Deploy Risotto for HR support requests

• Automate security and compliance-related inquiries

• Streamline software provisioning and access requests

The Future of Support: Intelligence at Scale

For Hazel Health, implementing Risotto wasn’t just about saving IT time, it was about fundamentally transforming how internal support operates across the organization. By creating a more intelligent, responsive support system, they’ve improved experiences for both IT staff and the healthcare providers they support. Key results since adopting Risotto:

• 4× increase in IT automation rate (from 3-5% to over 20%)

• Faster responses for frontline healthcare providers

• Improved employee experience with immediate IT support

• Seamless transition away from JIRA Assist to a more intelligent solution

Hazel Health’s experience demonstrates that with the right AI-powered support solution, IT teams can transition from being reactive service providers to strategic partners in organizational success.