IT operations and helpdesk support teams face a constant influx of inquiries and issues, often struggling to keep pace with the volume of requests. It's indicative that ticket volume has increased +35% in the last 2 years. This high workload can lead to delays in response times and challenges in providing timely assistance to employees (resolution time has increased by +57%), impacting overall support efficiency and employee satisfaction. At the same time, continuously answering the same questions and performing repetitive tasks that add zero value prevents IT operations and helpdesk teams from working on high-impact, strategic products that can positively change company processes and boost the bottom line.
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With Gaspar AI’s IT helpdesk platform, you can offer automated IT support solutions that improve your IT operations' efficiency, supercharge your teams’ productivity and free them up.
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An AI IT helpdesk is a system that uses artificial intelligence technologies to provide support and assistance for IT-related issues and queries. Instead of relying solely on human agents, AI-powered helpdesks are trained with LLMs and leverage natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and other AI techniques to understand and respond to user inquiries automatically. These systems can handle a variety of tasks, including troubleshooting technical problems, providing guidance on software or hardware issues, offering self-service options for common queries, and escalating complex issues to human agents when necessary.
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AI IT helpdesks can improve efficiency by providing instant responses and resolving issues without human intervention, reducing the workload on human support staff and offering round-the-clock assistance. They can also analyze data to identify trends, optimize workflows, and improve the overall quality of IT support services.
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In this blog post, we will present some of the most common uses of Gaspar AI by IT operations and helpdesk teams.  

## Smart IT helpdesk automation and workload optimization

Automate repetitive tasks and offer instant, no-humans-involved solutions, while ensuring friendly, human-like interactions that enhance user experience.

1. **Automatically reset passwords**: 20% to 50% of all IT helpdesk tickets each year are for password resets according to the Gartner Group, and password tickets consume 31% to 40% of the help desk's time. Thanks to Gaspar AI they can be [automated](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/how-to-get-rid-of-password-reset-requests-in-ten-seconds), saving helpdesk teams valuable time as they don’t need to get involved in the process anymore.

2. **Give access to folders and calendars**: It often happens that an employee might not have access to some folders or calendars they need. They can ask Gaspar, our AI chatbot, to give them access, and it will forward the request on Slack or MS Teams to the right person. They will approve or reject the request, and the employee will receive an update. No need for IT teams to intervene!  

3. **Provision hardware**: Ensure all employees get the hardware they need when they need it. Employees easily request it on Slack or MS Teams, and your IT team can then handle it. 

4. **Provision software in seconds**: Employees change roles, departments, projects – this means that they might need new licenses for apps they did not use before. Your helpdesk team can enable them to access them effortlessly. Again, everything is just a question away, and the whole approval process happens on Slack and MS Teams. 

5. **Email list, group and channel management**: With our AI-powered IT helpdesk, giving access to groups and email lists or removing users from channels is as easy and quick as sending a message.   

6. **Account management**: IT helpdesk teams can create new accounts, delete old ones and better manage existing ones in minutes by automating the process. 

7. **Offer instant IT info summaries to employees without getting involved**: Often, useful IT information is buried deep within files and systems and is hard to access, so employees keep contacting your helpdesk team about it. Gaspar AI empowers your workforce to instantly find it: IT troubleshooting, how-to questions, privacy policy, security FAQs and much more. Everything employees need is right at their fingertips, just a question away from our AI chatbot on Slack or MS Teams!  

8. **Know their projects’ deadlines**: Keeping up with project deadlines is crucial. With Gaspar AI it’s also super easy. IT operations and helpdesk employees ask our AI chatbot to give them an update and they instantly know what’s urgent and what’s not.  

9. **Automate onboarding and offboarding**: IT operations and helpdesk teams can use our no-code templates to craft custom workflows that automate these processes. Whenever there is a new hire or an employee leaves the company, they can deploy these custom workflows and make the procedure easier and more secure.  

## ITSM made easy

With traditional IT support or ITSM systems, users must contact IT operations and helpdesk teams via email or call, or log into the ITSM portal, raise a ticket and accurately describe their issue. Agents must manually review the tickets to prioritize and address incoming requests, ensure additional information is added to the ticket and continuously update its status. With our AI-powered IT helpdesk, your teams can now effortlessly create and manage tickets while information is automatically synced with your ITSM.  

1. **Offer quick and easy ticket creation on Slack or MS Teams**: For issues that need human attention, employees simply fill in a form on Slack or MS Teams to describe their issue (they can even attach screenshots and images), and a ticket is created on your ticketing platform. Your agents don’t need to go through emails or different systems, or even do any manual work: they automatically have the info they need on their ITSM and on their Slack or MS Teams interface. 

2. **Ticket management on Slack or MS Teams**: IT agents can see their tickets’ status, any pending approval requests, daily statistics and SLAs on Slack and MS Teams at any time. And while they are working on resolving tickets, their status is updated and notifications are sent automatically to employees on Slack and MS teams. 

3. **Intelligent ticket triage**: Whenever a ticket is raised, agents must manually categorize, prioritize, and assign the right resources. Gaspar AI’s IT helpdesk helps you promptly manage tickets. With its NLP capabilities, it analyzes the tickets, categorizes them, and assigns them to the right agent (depending on their expertise and availability). Moreover, it asks follow-up questions and interacts with the user to get more information for prompt resolution and accurate categorization. 

## Enhanced knowledge management
 
Gaspar AI integrates with your knowledge base and internal repositories to automatically index and ingest information, to then match employees' requests with concise solutions.  

1. **Enable easy, no-search knowledge access from multiple sources**: Gaspar AI integrates with knowledge bases (such as Confluence, Notion, Coda, Helpjuice and more), internal sources and repositories (e.g. Sharepoint, Dropbox, Google Docs) to ingest and index information, and then answer employee questions without human intervention and with no need to look for it.  

2. **Identify knowledge gaps**: Your helpdesk team gets information on their Admin Hub about the most frequent issues and questions. They can thus identify whether there are gaps in the company’s knowledge base which make it impossible for employees to self-serve their requests and solve their problems.  

3. **Knowledge base augmentation**: Based on these gaps, IT teams can fast-track the relevant content creation to enrich the company’s knowledge base and offer more opportunities for self-service. 

## Impactful business insights

With Gaspar AI, your IT helpdesk teams can discover high-impact automation use cases and get clear performance metrics. 

1. **Identify priority automation projects**: Gaspar AI’s IT helpdesk platform uncovers the most common employee issues, what’s hurting their productivity, which automations or content will unblock them. It uses large language models to break down ticket data and present the areas of service that need the most improvement. Thus, IT support teams can identify which automation opportunities and process improvements will have the biggest business impact and prioritize them.  

2. **Track key IT metrics**: On Gaspar AI’s Admin Hub, IT helpdesk managers can track their chatbot’s and platform’s performance. They also monitor which features, capabilities, and resources employees find valuable, compare performance over time and take data-driven action.  

## What are the benefits of Gaspar AI for IT helpdesk teams?

The importance of IT support teams cannot be overstated. They have multiple tasks to perform, ranging from tactical to strategic, all of which play an important role in the continuation of business and employee satisfaction. In the hybrid work world of nowadays, the IT helpdesk’s role is indispensable even in ensuring day-to-day productivity. However, IT support’s importance is often underestimated, and these teams are frequently understaffed. As requests and projects get multiplied by the minute, it is extremely important to find ways to enhance IT support.
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Gaspar AI does exactly this: by automating the mundane tasks and offering instant resolution to more than 40% of employee issues, it frees up IT teams’ time and empowers them to be more productive. Gaspar, our AI Virtual Agent, resolves employee issues directly on Slack, MS Teams and JSM support portal, and automates tasks without human intervention. Your busy teams no longer answer the same questions over and over and have fewer tickets to deal with.
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This leads to faster and low-cost resolution for all issues: Gaspar solves employee requests instantly and accurately, in natural language, deflecting a high number of tickets. Fewer tickets to be handled means faster resolution time even for requests that need to be addressed by human agents. It also means that IT operations’ costs decrease, as our platform minimizes the resources needed for each issue and the downtime costs. An employee helpdesk ticket costs just $1 when you deploy Gaspar AI, as opposed to $26.51 on average when you don’t.
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Finally, with Gaspar AI you can improve the perception of IT company-wide: 1/5 of employees claim tech issues and resolution times are the biggest challenges. With Gaspar AI, you can offer fast and accurate solutions to their most frequent problems, so that IT becomes their best partner. And with our Business Insights and Performance Metrics you can fill in knowledge gaps and prioritize automation opportunities, greatly impacting employee satisfaction with your department’s services. 

## How do I set up Gaspar AI?

Just start a free 21-day trial by filling in the form here. Then, log in with your SSO- e.g. Google, Microsoft 365. A member of our team will contact you to onboard you. Yes, it’s that simple!
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If you are curious to learn more about Gaspar AI, you can **schedule a free, personalized demo [here](https://www.gaspar.ai/demo-request)**. During the meeting, we can discuss your needs and you can see exactly how your helpdesk/IT team and employees can use the platform. 

Struggling with overwhelming IT support demands? Gaspar AI’s IT helpdesk automates most routine tasks and streamlines processes. Discover all the ways it helps!

Why your IT helpdesk team needs Gaspar AI

Shadow AI - also dubbed “shadow IT” or “BYOAI,”- is a term describing unsanctioned or ad-hoc generative AI use within an organization that's outside IT governance. This can occur when individual departments or employees adopt AI-powered tools or solutions independently, often without the knowledge or approval of central IT or data management teams. That enterprising spirit can be great, in a vacuum—but eager employees may lack relevant information or perspective regarding security, privacy or compliance. This can expose businesses to a great deal of risk. For example, an employee might unknowingly feed trade secrets to a public-facing AI model that continually trains on user input, or use copyright-protected material to train a proprietary model for content generation and expose their company to legal action.
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Shadow AI is an issue often overlooked when thinking about the risks of inefficient and slow employee support. And that’s too bad: according to [Salesforce](https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2023/09/07/ai-usage-research/), 75% of users are looking to automate tasks at work by using generative AI. But eager employees may lack relevant information or perspective regarding security, privacy or compliance.  This can significantly increase the risk exposure for businesses. For instance, an employee could inadvertently disclose trade secrets by feeding them into a publicly accessible AI model that continuously learns from user input.
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As if IT departments didn't have enough on their plate, the adoption of generative AI is gaining momentum. As per the Salesforce survey, 52% of respondents noted a rise in their usage of generative AI since its initial implementation. This surge signifies that the challenge of shadow AI is not only here but is also expanding, posing a growing concern for IT.
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"The reality is, everybody's using it," said Matt Barrington, Americas emerging technologies leader at EY about recent [EY research](https://www.ey.com/en_us/consulting/businesses-can-stop-rising-ai-use-from-fueling-anxiety) finding that 90% of respondents used AI at work. "Whether you like it or not, your people are using it today, so you should figure out how to align them to its ethical and responsible use." 

## Why employees resort to shadow AI?

There are various reasons why employees resort to shadow IT, including: 

1. Perceiving the IT/helpdesk department as slow and unresponsive or lacking the expertise to manage new technologies effectively. Think about it: with the Mean Time to Resolve an issue being 26 hours, oftentimes they can’t be bothered to remain idle for so long and potentially be unproductive.  
2. Needing solutions for specific use cases that approved applications don't cover. 
3. Facing budget limitations that prevent the adoption of officially sanctioned enterprise-level versions of emerging technologies. 
4. Finding the technological and tooling constraints of approved projects too limiting for their needs. 


They thus turn to user-friendly Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, which they can try out in their web browsers with little difficulty - without going through IT review and approval processes. The impulse is understandable, but shadow AI -- as with any sanctioned large language model (LLM) AI project -- presents various cybersecurity and business risks.  

## What are the risks associated with shadow AI?

Shadow AI can present various challenges and risks to companies, including the following: 

- **Functional risks**: Functional risks arise from the operational capabilities of an AI tool. Take, for instance, model drift, which occurs when the AI model deviates from its intended purpose due to changes in the technical environment or outdated training data. This deviation renders the model ineffective and potentially misleading, posing a functional risk to the company. 
- **Operational risks**: Operational risks pose threats to the company’s ability to conduct business effectively. These risks manifest in various forms. For example, a shadow AI tool might provide inaccurate advice due to model drift or might be hallucinating and generating false information. Acting on such advice could lead to wrong decisions.  
- **Data security and privacy concerns**: When using an unsanctioned AI system without proper oversight, there's a risk of sensitive data being mishandled or exposed, leading to potential breaches or compliance violations. For instance, a chatbot might ingest information included in an employee’s prompt; use it as training data; make it available to platform operators; and make it available to other users outside the company when answering their prompts. If the AI platform were to suffer a cyberattack, the data could also fall into cybercriminals' hands. Sharing such sensitive information with an LLM poses significant risks, including jeopardizing intellectual property, empowering competitors, violating data privacy regulations, eroding customer trust, and tarnishing the company’s reputation. 
- **Legal risks**: These materialize if shadow AI exposes the company to lawsuits or fines. Say the model advises leadership on business strategy. But the information is incorrect, and the company wastes a huge amount of money doing the wrong thing. Shareholders might sue. Lawsuits might also materialize if the shadow tool provides customers with bad advice generated by model drift or poisoned training data or if the model uses copyright-protected data for self-training. And, of course, violations of data privacy regulations could result in hefty legal penalties. 
- **Costs**: There can be wasteful or duplicative spending among shadow projects or between shadow and sanctioned ones. In some cases, shadow AI users may also waste money by failing to take advantage of volume and negotiated rates for similar, sanctioned technology. Consider, too, the opportunity cost stemming from shadow projects that ultimately fail because they do not follow company policies or good practices - that time and money could have been put toward other projects.  
- **Fragmentation and inconsistency**: Different departments or teams using disparate shadow AI tools can lead to inconsistencies in resource procurement, configuration and use.  
- **Control**: IT teams cannot see shadow IT resources, which means they can’t manage, organize and support them. 

## Unmasking shadow AI: how to get started

To address the challenges posed by shadow AI, companies need to implement robust governance frameworks and establish clear policies regarding the adoption and use of AI technologies. They should also encourage the collaboration between IT and business leaders to understand how various departments want to use AI. Additionally, centralizing AI deployment and management under the supervision of IT and data governance teams can help mitigate risks and ensure that AI initiatives contribute positively to the organization's overall success.
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However, as mentioned before, there is no guaranteed way to keep employees from using Generative AI to work more efficiently. Therefore, the most effective way to address Shadow IT is to provide an approved AI helpdesk platform. An AI employee helpdesk is a secure and always available support platform built for an AI-first world. Thanks to advanced language models, it offers dynamic, human-like conversations, seamlessly integrating with various communication channels and IT systems. It automates tasks and support resolution, and empowers employees to act, search, query, and generate content across a multitude of enterprise applications. Fueled by constantly improving generative models, AI-driven analytics for performance evaluation, and developer tools for customizable use cases, it's the future of assistance.  

## Addressing shadow IT challenges with an AI employee helpdesk

The AI helpdesk's swift and dependable issue resolution encourages employees to seek help from IT instead of resorting to unsafe fixes and shadow AI. Let's review how it addresses the main reasons why users resort to shadow AI in the first place. You will then understand why an AI employee helpdesk such as Gaspar AI can be your best ally in your fight against shadow IT.
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**1. Slow response times and lacking expertise** 

- **24/7 availability**: the AI helpdesk is available anytime, anywhere, so employees don’t have to rely on the agents’ work schedule or resort to unsecure fixes when the helpdesk team is not available. 
- **Instant resolution**: By automatically solving their most common issues, employees have no reason to seek help elsewhere. Also, by facilitating handoff to the right agent, they can resolve even the most complex issues easier and more quickly. 
- **Ease of use**: Thanks to LLM training, NLP and NLU, employees just talk to the AI helpdesk’s chatbot in everyday language on your company’s chat platform, e.g. Slack, MS Teams. They are instantly understood, engage in interactive conversations and get human-like answers. They now have one user-friendly, unified solution for their support. 
- **Accurate answers based on your company’s data**: All answers generated are precise and based on your company’s information, as opposed to using shadow AI. At Gaspar AI for instance, we use [Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-and-enterprise-helpdesk) which means that our language model generates answers based on your knowledge base. 
- **AI trained with sector-specific datasets**: This means that answers accurately depict your company’s specific environment and context. 

**2. No approved solutions for specific use cases**  

- **AI customization**: It’s very easy to build specific uses cases with an AI tool. With Gaspar AI for example, you can [automate workflows ](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/how-to-complete-employee-onboarding-in-under-one-minute)(e.g. employee onboarding) and connect systems without coding – just use our intuitive templates! 
- **Out-the-box integrations**: Most AI helpdesks come with ready-to-use integrations that offer solutions to the most common use cases.  

**3. No access to officially sanctioned solutions due to budget limitations** 

- **Low cost**: Contrary to what one would believe, an AI helpdesk can be a very cost-effective solution making it possible to be adopted at enterprise level. Gaspar AI, for example, has a cost of $4 per user monthly, therefore allowing even small companies to deploy it.   

**4. Limiting technological and tooling constraints of approved projects**

- **Scalability**: A well-chosen AI helpdesk is easy to scale and accommodate more use cases and increasing support demands.  
- **Flexibility**: AI employee helpdesks offer flexibility to connect with tools such as IT management systems and commonly used apps, covering most user needs. 
- **Multiple features**: A good AI helpdesk offers a wide variety of features such as issue resolution, ticket management, asset management, incident management, change management, business insights, analytics and reporting.  
 

## From shadow AI to safe solutions: harnessing the power of AI helpdesks

Security, IT and risk leaders should not expect shadow AI to go away any time soon. As new-generation LLMs become more numerous and diverse, there is every reason to expect shadow AI projects will multiply as well – an AI employee helpdesk is probably the safest and smartest solution. As generative AI usage becomes increasingly pervasive, companies will need to consider a broader strategy which will include adopting helpdesk tools that better meet business needs and encourage ethical and safe AI use. And data shows the effort is worth it. 76% of IT leaders believe GenAI will be significant if not transformative for their organizations, and 65% believe they will see meaningful results within the next year according to a [recent Dell survey](https://www.dell.com/en-us/perspectives/new-research-the-dell-genai-pulse-survey/?dgc=Af&cid=aithoughtleadership&lid=Forbes14).
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With an AI employee helpdesk such as Gaspar AI you can offer easy, instant, accurate and scalable support to end users minimizing their eagerness to seek solutions in unsafe places. You can rest assured that your company’s data and sensitive information will remain private. Any information collected from our customers is strictly confidential and will never be shared with other customers or utilized to train our generic AI model. The sole purpose of collecting these data is to enhance and personalize your individual model for an improved and tailored experience. What’s more, all generated answers and solutions adhere to existing permissions and access rights. Employees won’t be able to view or access information they are not supposed to.
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If you’d like to start addressing shadow AI projects today, you can [schedule a free demo](https://www.gaspar.ai/demo-request) where we will discuss your company-specific needs, show you around the platform and experience first-hand the magic of AI-powered support.
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_Citations:_

- _TechTarget, 10 top AI and machine learning trends for 2024, https://www.techtarget.com/searchenterpriseai/tip/9-top-AI-and-machine-learning-trends_ 
- _Forbes, What Is Shadow AI And What Can IT Do About It https://www.forbes.com/sites/delltechnologies/2023/10/31/what-is-shadow-ai-and-what-can-it-do-about-it/_  
- _TechTarget, Shadow AI poses new generation of threats to enterprise IT, https://www.techtarget.com/searchsecurity/tip/Shadow-AI-poses-new-generation-of-threats-to-enterprise-IT#:~:text=Operational%20risks%20come%20in%20many,%2D%2D%20i.e.%2C%20generating%20false%20information_
- _EY, AI Anxiety in Business Survey October 2023, https://www.ey.com/en_us/consulting/businesses-can-stop-rising-ai-use-from-fueling-anxiety_
- _The Dell GenAI Pulse Survey October 2023, https://www.dell.com/en-us/perspectives/new-research-the-dell-genai-pulse-survey/?dgc=Af&cid=aithoughtleadership&lid=Forbes14_

How to address shadow AI risks with an AI employee helpdesk

Discover the impact of shadow AI and how AI employee helpdesks offer secure, scalable, and ethical solutions to mitigate risks and enhance support.

Frustrating for both users and administrators, password management can be a challenge to manage in any organization. One lost or stolen password may be the crack in your organization's foundation, allowing an attacker to slip in.
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Resetting user passwords is a routine yet essential task for IT service and help desks. However, while it may seem straightforward, it is tedious for the IT staff, unproductive for everyone and very costly for companies. Given that passwords are still the primary authentication method for many businesses, addressing this issue is extremely important.

## Why are account lockouts and password resets so common?

From the user's perspective, creating passwords may seem simple, but remembering them is a different story. With strict character requirements, many users resort to reusing passwords, leading to forgetfulness. This often results in either getting locked out of their accounts or requesting frequent resets.
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From a business standpoint, despite updated guidelines from [NIST](https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/), periodic password resets remain common practice. Password age limitations in Active Directory enforce these resets, yet they often lead to weaker passwords and account lockouts due to procrastination.
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Additionally, most users have about [100 individual passwords to manage](https://tech.co/password-managers/how-many-passwords-average-person#:~:text=How%20many%20passwords%20does%20the,repeat%20passwords%20or%20password%20elements.), which increases the likelihood of forgetfulness and errors, even with password managers. This highlights the need for a more efficient approach to password management. 

## How password resets hurt the bottom line

Password resets may seem like an easy problem to solve, but they are not, and if you add on top the volume of requests, it makes them an extremely time-consuming, repetitive, boring task.
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20% to 50% of all IT help desk tickets each year are for password resets according to the Gartner Group, and password tickets consume 31% to 40% of the help desk's time. Each reset ticket incurs substantial costs: [Forrester Research](https://conduitstreet.mdcounties.org/2020/03/24/the-true-costs-of-password-management/) estimates that one password reset can cost $70. These expenses encompass IT staff time, resources (using the necessary backend infrastructure) and lost employee productivity, so yearly costs for these common requests seem unreasonable. For instance, for a 1,000-employee company, this leads to a $70,000 yearly cost, assuming that every employee will need at least one password reset (most probably, they will need more).
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Regarding lost productivity, each time a user undergoes the password reset process— which involves pausing work on a project, contacting the help desk, waiting on hold, waiting for the reset, selecting a new password, and then logging back in—they are essentially costing the company productive time. In a study conducted by Forrester, researchers discovered that employees spend an average of eleven hours annually grappling with password issues. When extrapolated across a company with hundreds or thousands of employees, these lost hours translate into millions of dollars in lost revenue.
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Plus, when a user is locked out, the password reset takes priority over other vital tasks since that user can no longer work. Any organization's priority would be to get that individual productive once again. Thus, a password reset necessarily diverts a helpdesk's attention from the strategic and impactful tasks they would be working on. 

## Automated password reset with Gaspar AI helpdesk

Timewise and cost-wise, password resets are bad. Thankfully, with Gaspar AI you can kiss your password reset tickets goodbye! When you install Gaspar AI, you can integrate with password management applications, including SSO and MFA apps, and enable the related automation. Employees who forget a password will ask Gaspar (our AI chatbot) for a password reset. In seconds, Gaspar will identify the employee thanks to the relevant plugins and provide the necessary temporary password to the employee to reset it. Then, the employee will choose a new password, and that’s all! Their password is changed across all places that use it without any human intervention.
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**If you get a ton of these questions every month, [schedule a demo](https://www.gaspar.ai/demo-request) with us and give your employees the gift of time.** Imagine the things your helpdesk team could do when they get all this password reset tickets time back. :) 

automated password reset with Gaspar AI to save money

Struggling with password resets? Discover how Gaspar AI automates them, saving you time and money and boosting productivity.

Password resets are costing you $70k/year. Automate them.

At Gaspar AI, we’re constantly upgrading our platform to enable you to offer the best-in-class support to your workforce. So, let’s do a new feature roundup and look at all the important features we built in the last few months. 

## New AI-powered automations for increased productivity

Empowering your teams to be more productive is at the core of Gaspar AI and one of our main goals. But this can only happen when employees are not burdened by tedious tasks or stuck looking for information endlessly within your systems. The same goes for your IT and helpdesk teams: how can they be productive when they keep on receiving tickets?
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That’s why we worked to build new automations that will take the friction out of your workforce’s day-to-day activities, and reduce your ticket volume:  

- **Lots of updates on Okta**: now users can reset passwords and MFA settings effortlessly without human intervention, suspend accounts and manage groups.  

- **Automated group management on JumpCloud**: easily create groups, add to and remove people from groups, find all the groups a user belongs to. 

- **Provision hardware – laptops, tablets, phones, etc. – to employees via Slack or MS Teams**: No need for employees to log in to portals or send emails. They simply fill in a form on Slack or MS Teams and accelerate the approval process. 

 

## Power-up internal communications

Finally, you can ensure that internal communications are... communicated! How many times have you been asked about procedures, reminders, notifications, for which you have sent clear, explanatory emails and announcements?
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If you are fed up with sending important email updates that nobody reads, then you’ll love this new feature. Reach and engage employees by sending tailored messages directly through chat — motivating them to act. You can create announcements about anything you like right on Slack and MS Teams: software migrations, planned maintenance, office lunches, team reviews, changes in HR time-off policy, and so much more. Send reminders about expenses submission, or updates about new product launches and campaigns.
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Everything is just a click away, and you can rest assured that your updates won’t stay unread anymore! Since everything happens on Slack and MS Teams where your employees are, everyone will be in the know.  

## More efficient ticket submission

One of the things employees hate when submitting tickets is writing down everything about the issue they face. And yet, for their issue to be resolved faster, it’s important that agents have as much info as possible.
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Make life easier for both end users and agents by attaching visual elements on Freshservice! When employees submit a ticket, they can attach an image or screenshot depicting their issue. When the helpdesk agent steps in to handle the request, they use the visual clues to better understand the problem.
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No more lengthy explanations needed – just snap, attach, and let Gaspar AI work its magic!  

## Targeted feedback for maximum impact

What’s not measured can’t be improved. The quickest and most efficient way to know how your helpdesk team performs is by hearing directly from end users.
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Get direct feedback on Slack and MS Teams by setting-up up 1 to 5-star scale surveys. Whenever a request is resolved via an agent, a 5-star rating scale pops up. Just a click, and the employee rates their experience by sharing their satisfaction level.  

## Further optimize knowledge sharing with our SharePoint integration

Now, you can offer AI-generated answer summaries from your SharePoint sites, on top of other knowledge sources such as Coda, Google docs, Notion, Confluence, Helpjuice, Dropbox.
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Gaspar AI indexes SharePoint sites, ingests knowledge and generates accurate, human-like answers. No need for employees to dig into tons of content and search for hours. Everything is delivered on Slack and MS Teams.
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These updates take us closer to offering a safe, fair and helpful generative AI platform that enables employees and support teams to work more efficiently and intelligently. 

**Want to see Gaspar AI in action? Schedule a demo [here](https://www.gaspar.ai/demo-request)** 

Discover Gaspar AI's latest updates: new automations, enhanced productivity tools, streamlined ticketing, and powerful internal communications.

Gaspar AI Spring 2024 product updates

Chatbots and AI-powered solutions have been around for a while now, but it’s only in recent years that they’ve gained real popularity among users and businesses alike, thanks to the great progress of Generative AI. You might remember Eliza, the first-ever chatbot that acted as a psychotherapist, or maybe you’ve used Clippit and you’re left with a sour taste in your mouth. Clippit (a.k.a. Clippy) was an early conversational assistant in MS Office that spoke at you rather than with you. Clippy greeted and treated repeat users as if they had never used the program before, earning widespread hate. It was less of an assistant and more of a bottleneck.
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Since then, conversational AI assistants have evolved to being an indispensable part of our lives – personal (think Siri and ChatGPT) and work (think Microsoft copilot, Gaspar AI and more). Thankfully, they’ve also become great helpers, earning widespread love thanks to Generative AI advancements. It’s become imperative to deploy Generative AI in every business: it transforms business operations by enabling them to automate tasks, create new products and services and elevate customer experiences – ultimately leading to a better bottom line.
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Gaspar AI is one such Generative AI solution. If you’re unsure about how you can use it and what the platform offers, this blog post is for you. You will discover multiple use cases of Gaspar AI across your company and understand why your employees and support teams will be better-off with our AI helpdesk by their side. 

 

## First, what is Gaspar AI?

Gaspar AI is a secure and always available Generative AI helpdesk platform that uses Generative AI for smarter and more efficient employee support. Thanks to advanced language models, it offers dynamic, human-like conversations, seamlessly integrating with various communication channels such as Slack and MS Teams, commonly used apps and IT systems. It empowers employees to act, search, query, and generate content across a multitude of enterprise applications.  

 

## What are Gaspar AI’s main components?


Our AI helpdesk blends several [advanced technologies](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/gaspar-generative-ai-helpdesk) to deliver sophisticated automation and support, including: 

- **Conversational Interface**: Using technologies such as large language models (LLMs), natural language processing (NLP), and natural language understanding (NLU), it is possible to interpret and comprehend free-form requests. Processes including semantic analysis, entity extraction, and intent recognition enable smooth and coherent dialogues. 

- **[Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-and-enterprise-helpdesk) (RAG)**: This involves two processes: retrieving relevant information from an extensive data source and generating a contextually enriched and accurate response which integrates the retrieved information. This step is crucial as it ensures that the output is not just factually accurate but also linguistically coherent and contextually apt.  

- **Plugins**: They are specialized components that execute planned actions. Each plugin is custom-built for specific tasks and system integrations, such as resetting passwords in Okta or adding accounts in Google Workspace. When combined, they automate processes seamlessly across your existing systems, leveraging your current setup. 

- **Generative Summarization**: Our AI model consolidates information and produces clear, accurate, human-like responses in natural language and in a digestible format, customized to each employee inquiry. 

- **Act across systems**: Efficient integration ensures seamless transitions between conversational comprehension, solution strategy, process automation, and summarization. 

- **Trust Mechanisms**: Our AI platform incorporates features such as citations, employee satisfaction review and human oversight to ensure accountability and safety.  

 

## Top 30 Gaspar AI Generative AI helpdesk use cases

The following 30 use cases highlight the extensive capabilities of Gaspar AI’s helpdesk across various enterprise systems – there are more! As you review the list, observe how our solution is uniquely equipped to not only search and retrieve information from numerous sources and repositories, or guide users to perform actions, but also to automate and act.
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We designed Gaspar AI as one unified, user-friendly, easy-to-adopt, out-the-box platform. We recognize though that every business has unique needs, which is why we made our helpdesk platform scalable and offer the flexibility for organizations to extend the platform. With robust ML operations and high customization capabilities, it is easy to build and accommodate new use cases and extend to new languages while preserving critical business logic.  

### IT support and operations AI helpdesk use cases

An AI helpdesk can empower IT operations teams to automate the ITSM process and optimize support operations. 

1. **Hardware provisioning**: Ensure all employees get the hardware – be it laptop, mobile phone or tablet - they need when they need it. 

2. **Automatically reset passwords**: Thanks to Gaspar AI password resets can be automated, saving helpdesk teams up to 50% of their time as they don’t need to get involved in the process anymore. 

3. **Software provisioning**: Enable employees to have access to the right applications and better manage licenses. 

4. **Account management**: Create new accounts, delete old ones, better manage existing ones. 

5. **MFA removal**: Easily remove the MFA from a specific account. 

6. **Provide Generative AI-powered search on the Jira SM support portal**: Allow employees to get summarized answers straight from Confluence on JSM. 

7. **Offer quick and easy ticket creation on Slack or MS Teams**: For issues that need human attention, employees simply fill in a form on Slack or MS Teams to describe their issue (they can even attach screenshots and images), and a ticket is created on your ticketing platform.  

8. **Ticket management on Slack or MS Teams**: IT agents can see their tickets’ status, any pending approval requests, daily statistics and SLAs on Slack and MS Teams at any time. 

9. **Intelligent ticket triage**: Our helpdesk helps you promptly manage tickets. With its NLP capabilities, it analyzes the tickets, categorizes them, and assigns them to the right agent (depending on their expertise and availability). Moreover, it asks follow-up questions and interacts with the user to get more information for prompt resolution and accurate categorization. 

10. **Identify priority automation projects**: With AI-powered insights, IT Operations teams can prioritize projects that will have the highest impact on the business bottom line. 

11. **Enable easy, no-search knowledge access from multiple sources**: Gaspar AI integrates with knowledge bases (such as Confluence, Notion, Coda, Helpjuice and more), internal sources and repositories (e.g. Sharepoint, Dropbox, Google Docs) to ingest and index information, and then answer employee questions without human intervention and with no need to look for it.  

12. **Knowledge base augmentation**: Our AI helpdesk uncovers the most common employee issues and identifies existing knowledge gaps. IT teams can fast-track the relevant content creation to enrich the company’s knowledge base and offer more opportunities for self-service. 

13. **Track key IT metrics**: On Gaspar AI’s Admin Hub, IT managers can track their chatbot’s and platform’s performance. They also monitor which features, capabilities, and resources employees find valuable, compare performance over time and take data-driven action. 

14. **Customize field values on Jira**: IT teams can add a new value to a configured custom field in Jira. 

15. **Enable Generative AI capabilities on Atlassian Data Center**: The only GenAI solution that works for Atlassian Data Center customers. 

 

### HR AI helpdesk use cases

Our Generative AI helpdesk tackles routine HR tasks and offers immediate support: 

16. **Request time off**: Streamline the time-off approval process and allow for quicker approvals. 

17. **Offer access to health insurance information**: Offer employees a straightforward way to retrieve critical information regarding their health insurance benefits. 

18. **Review retirement plan balance**: Enable employees to promptly check their retirement account balance and access important information regarding their retirement plan. 

19. **Find out PTO balance**: Offer employees quick and easy access to information tailored specifically to their needs and employment situation. 

20. **Speed-up onboarding**: Make the process swift and delightful for new hires, ensuring no crucial steps are missed. 

21. **Facilitate offboarding**: Allow for a smooth offboarding process that keeps company data secure by automating the process. 

22. **Automate reminders for performance reviews**: Ensure that all employees complete their performance reviews on time by sending reminders on Slack and MS Teams.  

23. **Update the organizational structure**: When employees move across the company, easily change the organizational unit of an account. 

24. **Send announcements for company news**: Make sure that your company updates are not staying hidden and unread in the employees’ inboxes by sending automated updates on Slack and MS Teams. 

 

### Sales AI helpdesk use cases

Offer your Sales reps quick and easy access to information tailored specifically to their needs: 

25. **Access their sales contracts**: Sales reps ask our Generative AI Virtual Agent any contract-related question and it answers with information tailored specifically to them.  

26. **Find out payment and credit policies**: Empower your Sales team to quickly respond to prospects’ questions by giving them instant access to the information they are looking for. 

27. **Know their projects’ deadlines**: Sales reps ask our AI chatbot to give them an update and they instantly know what’s urgent and what’s not. 

 

### Collaboration AI helpdesk use cases

Collaboration platforms such as [Microsoft Teams](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/using-ms-teams-for-it-support) and [Slack](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/employee-helpdesk-on-slack) provide ideal environments for our AI helpdesk to deliver added value through: 

28. **Request access to shared folders**: Employees effortlessly locate and ask our AI helpdesk chatbot for access to specific folders.  

29. **Get how-to instructions**: Empower your workforce to instantly find the information they are looking for: IT troubleshooting, VPN and network access, security FAQs, and much more.  

30. **Task notifications**: Send proactive reminders to employees about upcoming tasks and deadlines to boost productivity and minimize missed assignments. 

31. **Create new groups and email lists**: Allow employees to easily create a new group or email list by asking for information such as name, purpose, members, and any necessary permissions. 

32. **Add people to and remove them from groups and email lists**: Effortlessly add employees to groups and distribution lists, or remove them. 

33. **Access shared calendars**: Enable employees to access shared calendars such as vacation calendars in seconds, adhering to existing permissions. 

34. **Manage people in Slack channels**: Make it easy to add or remove people from Slack channels. 

 

**If you’re curious to learn more about our use cases or see Gaspar AI in action, please [book a free meeting](https://www.gaspar.ai/demo-request)!**  

Explore how you can use Gaspar AI's helpdesk, designed to enhance employee support and streamline issue resolution across various enterprise systems.

30+ GenAI helpdesk use cases for your business

Helpdesk teams are struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing volume of incoming employee requests. The traditional way of doing support is highly inefficient: resolution is always late, ticket backlogs are only increasing, and strategic projects are left with no human resources. At the same time, end users can’t work on their projects, complain about IT and helpdesk teams and can’t find crucial information. IT and helpdesk teams are overwhelmed and stressed, employees are unproductive and unhappy. That’s a lot of negativity to deal with!
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Recognizing this complexity, Gaspar AI streamlines employee support by offering a generative AI, unified, easy-to-use solution for instant assistance. In this blog, we will focus on our Slack integration and explain why setting up an employee helpdesk there can offer great benefits to your company, what are the main features, and how you can install it. 

 
## What is Gaspar AI’s generative AI helpdesk?

A generative AI helpdesk for employee support empowers your teams to perform tasks, find answers and take informed decisions. It is a secure and always available support platform built for an AI-first world. Thanks to advanced language models, it offers dynamic, human-like conversations, seamlessly integrating with various communication channels and IT systems. It empowers employees to act, search, query, and generate content across a multitude of enterprise applications. Fueled by constantly improving generative models, AI-driven analytics for performance evaluation, and developer tools for customizable use cases, it's the future of assistance.
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Gaspar AI’s genAI helpdesk platform integrates with various knowledge bases (such as Coda, Notion, Google Docs, Confluence and more) and uses [Retrieval Augmented Generation](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/retrieval-augmented-generation-and-enterprise-helpdesk) (RAG) to search and retrieve relevant information. Thanks to [advanced NLP](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/gaspar-generative-ai-helpdesk) it generates accurate, helpful, human-like responses, ensuring that the generated answers are contextually appropriate, reliable and tailored to the employee's needs. Our platform is characterized by reduced hallucinations when compared to others: RAG mitigates the risk of generating misleading or incorrect responses that could lead to user frustration or worse, wrong decisions.
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It also offers more than [30 ready-to-use integrations](https://www.gaspar.ai/integrations) with your commonly used apps to automate more than a hundred tasks. Gaspar AI understands queries necessitating actions across different platforms, their intent and user context, and executes them automatically, sparing your agents from manual intervention. Our plugins seamlessly integrate into your workflow, automating mundane employee support tasks such as password resets and software access approvals, empowering your employees to handle essential functions like time-off requests with ease—all without the need for human intervention. 

 

## Why integrate a generative AI helpdesk within Slack?

 

Integrating the generative AI helpdesk with Slack presents multiple benefits for organizations aiming to enhance their service desk operations: 

 

- **Enhanced accessibility**: Employees can access the helpdesk directly within Slack, where they already spend a substantial amount of their time, making it convenient to seek help without switching platforms or knowing technical jargon. 

- **Streamlined communication**: By integrating with Slack, all helpdesk interactions are centralized in one platform, simplifying communication and making it easier to track and manage support requests. 

- **Increased user adoption**: Since employees are already familiar with Slack, they are more likely to use the AI helpdesk, leading to higher engagement and utilization rates. 

- **Enhanced and real-time collaboration**: Integration with Slack facilitates better collaboration among employees and support agents, as they can easily share information, documents, and updates within the same platform. 

- **Cost savings**: Integrating the helpdesk within Slack can lead to cost savings by consolidating tools and eliminating the need for separate service desk software licenses. Additionally, it boosts the ROI of current Slack investments.  


By embedding service desk capabilities within Slack, companies can establish a central hub for communication, collaboration, and problem-solving. This consolidation simplifies workflows and nurtures a culture of teamwork and knowledge sharing among employees. 

 
## Gaspar AI helpdesk Slack integration key features

When you integrate Slack with Gaspar AI, you get extra AI-powered features to optimize your employee support operations and boost efficiency. 

 

### Automated resolution

Gaspar AI’s Generative AI chatbot automatically and instantly resolves at least 40% of employee issues without human intervention, powered by LLMs and 3rd party plugins. Most common problems addressed include [password resets](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/automated-password-reset), software and hardware provisioning, group and email management, access requests, and more! 

### Automated approvals

Gaspar AI makes it easy for everyone to ask for time-off or access the channels, folders and groups they need but not the ones they don't. The process happens on Slack for both the requester and the approver, and they can track the request’s status on the same platform.  

### Instant, accurate, human-like answers

Your workforce can instantly find information – HR policies, IT troubleshooting and more just by asking our AI Virtual Agent on Slack. It searches articles, documents and data across knowledge bases and repositories, and can ask follow-up questions until employees get the exact answer. Our chatbot serves them concise summaries instead of links to articles, along with citations to enhance trust.  

### Efficient internal communications

If you are fed up with sending important email updates that nobody reads, then you’ll love this feature. With Gaspar AI, you can reach and engage employees by sending tailored messages directly through Slack — motivating them to act. You can create announcements about anything: software migrations, planned maintenance, office lunches, team reviews, changes in HR time-off policy, reminders about expenses submission, or updates about new product launches and campaigns.  

### No-code workflow automation

Reduce manual work by 80% and minimize repetitive tasks such as [onboarding](https://www.gaspar.ai/blog/how-to-complete-employee-onboarding-in-under-one-minute) by creating no-code, customized workflows. You can activate them whenever needed directly from Slack or set up triggers.  

### Hassle-free, automated ITSM

In case of auto-resolution, a ticket is automatically created on your ITSM platform. If the chatbot can't resolve the issue, it facilitates handoff to the right agent with easy ticket creation on Slack and smart routing. End users and agents can follow up the process, receive updates and track the status on Slack at any moment.  

 

## Setting up Gaspar AI on Slack

Setting up Gaspar AI is a straightforward process. You can start with a [free 21-day trial](https://www.gaspar.ai/free-trial-signup). Then, log in with your SSO- e.g. Google, Microsoft 365 – and a member of our team will contact you to onboard you. You can also see detailed steps [here](https://www.gaspar.ai/slack-integration). You will have the opportunity to configure permissions and access controls to ensure that everyone accesses only the information they should, and that sensitive information remains secure. IT admins will define the appropriate level of access for different user roles, including administrators, IT support staff and end-users. The platform is highly customizable, so you can choose the features and level of automation you want.
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We're enthusiasts for great software, both as users and creators. That's why we've prioritized making the entire journey, from setup to everyday use, as effortless as possible. 

 

## Benefits of Gaspar AI in the workplace

Implementing Gaspar AI on Slack has multiple benefits for end users and helpdesk teams: 

 

- **More than 40% of issues automatically resolved**: Gaspar, our AI Virtual Agent, resolves employee issues directly on Slack and automates tasks without human intervention. Your busy teams no longer answer the same questions over and over and have fewer tickets to deal with. 

- **80% less manual work**: By automating the most repetitive tasks, end users and helpdesk teams perform less manual work.  

- **More than 85% of questions instantly answered**: Gaspar AI answers instantly and automatically most of employee queries, with no need for human intervention or search. 

- **Increased productivity**: Fast and accurate issue resolution means less downtime, which empowers your workforce to be more productive.  

- **24/7 access to help**: Our generative AI helpdesk knows no time limit – it's available whenever employees need it.  

- **More time to work on strategic, impactful projects**: With fewer tickets to handle, IT teams are free to focus on bigger and more important projects. 

- **Decreased costs**: With Gaspar AI you decrease resolution time and the cost of inefficient time, thus lowering related costs. Consequently, your company saves money and increases profitability. 

- **Happier employees**: Streamlined communication leads to perfect employee experiences: it frees their time and makes them more productive, leading to higher satisfaction, retention, and a great workplace culture. 

 

If you’d like to take a step forward into your AI journey, [schedule a call](https://www.gaspar.ai/demo-request) with us to discuss your needs and goals. You will also get the chance to see the platform in action and experience our generative AI power first-hand.

Discover how to offer more efficient support with a generative AI helpdesk on Slack. Understand the key features, benefits and capabilities. Read now!

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