Achieving Zero Service Desk

[Sujit Agrawal]

A zero service desk aims to eliminate manual ticket handling by support agents, leverage AI and automation for self-service, request fulfillment, and issue resolution. It also needs detect and fixing  issues before users notice.

Agentic AI refers to autonomous AI agents empowered to act and collaborate with other agents to take full-cycle ownership of requests. ServiceNow’s platform increasingly supports such capabilities through GenAI/NowAssist, virtual agents, workflow orchestration, and integrations.

Here is the recipe for achieving zero service desk in ServiceNow -

Set the foundation - ensure knowledge articles are AI-optimized: structured, current, and context-aware for self-service and agentic AI training. Simply processes, leverage ServiceNow OOTB capabilities. Identify a few use cases (password resets, software requests, onboarding, etc.) for complete automation.

Enable conversational experience - integrate user context (history, permissions, device state) into the decision-making and initiate workflows, and trigger automations (integrate with backend systems like AD, HRIS, SaaS apps) to orchestrate autonomous workflows

Leverage AI Ops to detect, predict, and fix issues before tickets are raised (e.g., device health, app errors). Predict needs based on patterns—preemptively reach out with support or fulfill requests.

Intelligent Routing & Exception Handling - route rare, ambiguous, or escalated cases intelligently, providing as much AI-supported context as possible for minimal human intervention

Finally establish feedback loops to gather user feedback to refine workflows and virtual agent interactions. Continuously retrain agentic AI using new ticket data, resolutions, and user feedback. Foster continuous collaboration between IT, business, and AI specialists to measure success by the KPIs (e.g., automation rates, mean time to resolution, user satisfaction, and instances of agent bypass) to enable continuous improvement.