Oops, Help desk closed

Here's a situation we hear about from customers all the time. Someone gets hired as an IT support manager. They inherit two techs, a shared inbox (or a ticketing system nobody likes), and a mandate that sounds something like "build us a proper tiered support team." They have six months to show it's working.

It's tempting to start shopping for software. But first you need to find out why everyone hates the current setup. A new ticketing system won't help much if the real problem is that nobody knows who's supposed to approve a laptop.

We've analysed dozens of Reddit threads on r/sysadmin and here's what we've found: the people who run help desks for a living are not impressed. They aren't all hostile, though. Somewhere between "nobody wants this" and a vendor promising 90% deflection, a handful of admins have quietly got AI doing useful work. It just isn't the work the demos show.

Every helpdesk vendor now sells "AI". What they actually ship differs a lot. Some offer a chatbot that answers customers before a ticket exists. Some offer a copilot that drafts replies for agents. Others hand you a platform and a consultant's invoice. The pricing models differ too: per seat, per conversation, per "resolution", or a pool of credits that nobody on the buying committee fully understands.