A limited IT help desk staff of four supporting a rapidly growing city needed to enable capacity without adding headcount

Seventy-five new residents move to Raleigh, North Carolina every day. It’s an exciting time in a city that shows no signs of slowing. But behind the scenes, growth creates tremendous pressure.

More residents mean more city services. More questions. More calls.

For Mark Wittenburg, Chief Information Officer for the City of Raleigh, the math wasn’t adding up: four help desk staff supporting 4,400 employees relying on over 80,000 devices. And that’s just part of the demand. The city also fields roughly 300,000 service calls from residents each year, a number that keeps rising.

“What’s not increasing is my staff,” Wittenburg says. “The only way I can continue to respond to Raleigh’s growth is by becoming more effective at how we’re doing things.”

A decade of work laid the foundation

The shift didn’t start with AI. It began 10 years earlier with IT change management.

It was narrow in scope, but the beginning of something that would compound. IT Service Management (ITSM) followed. Then HR. Facilities. Security. Each step added structure, consistency, and—most importantly—knowledge and efficiency.

Over time, Raleigh built a trusted knowledge base and workflows that reflect how work gets done. When AI capabilities became available within the ServiceNow AI Platform, Raleigh didn’t have to start over. The foundation was already there.

“Our vision has always been to use tools that work for us,” says Beth Stagner, Assistant Director of IT, who has worked at the city for over 30 years. “With ServiceNow, we’ve been able to take what works and expand it across the city in ways we couldn’t before.”

That expansion did more than standardize processes. It also strengthened the city’s knowledge base, turning it into a resource employees could rely on to make the next leap possible.

AI agent Ral-E works alongside city staff and changes how work gets done

Raleigh introduced a ServiceNow AI Agent, Ral-E, designed for and named after the city itself.

Ral-E guides employees through service requests, routes tickets, and answers questions using the city's knowledge base. It scales to support a level of work that Wittenburg's small, expert team couldn't otherwise handle, across IT, HR, and facilities.

"I think of these AI agents almost as employees of the city," says Wittenburg. "And we're managing them to provide that quick service."

Raleigh's earlier virtual agent relied on scripted conversations. To build it, staff had to predict every question an employee could ask, write the response, and map it to the right request. It worked, but only within the limits of what people could anticipate. It was also labor intensive to maintain.

Ral-E changed that. The day the system went live, a staff member—one who had previously spent considerable time writing those scripted conversations—tested Ral-E with a simple name-change query. The old system would have routed the question to a predetermined path, but Ral-E went far beyond. It surfaced the payroll implications, walked through the HR benefits changes, identified the directory update, and guided the submission of each.

All without being asked, without a script, and without anyone ever predicting that combination of needs.

"We were shocked by the results," says Chris King, IT portfolio manager. "It gave people exactly what they needed, without us having to guess the scenario ahead of time."

Alongside Ral-E, the city introduced Now Assist for ITSM, making it possible to generate incident summaries automatically. What once took significant time across more than 14,000 incidents each year became instant. In just three months of rollout, the team saved 87 hours of writing time and 50 hours of reading time.

But instead of stepping back, city staff leaned in. They started documenting their work more clearly and consistently, knowing better inputs would lead to better outputs.

And they did. Today, up to 98% of AI-generated summaries are accepted as-is.

"With that level of accuracy, employees are saying: that's exactly right," King says. "And that makes people excited about what AI can do next."

Ral-E now routes 98% of tickets correctly on the first try, eliminating the rework that once slowed everything down—adding up to a 66% reduction in IT service desk costs and more than 1,300 staff hours returned each year.

"With the ServiceNow AI Agents taking the load off, our staff can cross-train, learn new skills, and focus on more meaningful work," says Stagner.

AIli takes on more, giving staff time to focus on what matters

Ral-E changed how employees find answers. Alli changed what happens next.

Where Ral-E guides and routes, Alli does work end-to-end—handling common requests from start to finish without human intervention unless the situation genuinely requires it. Through early access to ServiceNow’s Autonomous Workforce of AI specialists, the city is shifting from AI that assists to AI that completes work.

"AI specialists handle the repetitive requests, the ones where careless mistakes can happen after someone has done them a thousand times," says Wittenburg. "That frees our staff to focus on complex problems and gives them room to grow."

Raleigh is taking a crawl-walk-run approach by testing internally, building trust, and expanding carefully. More than 20 workflows are already automated, with many more on the horizon.

AI-powered service reaches every resident of a growing city

Raleigh’s next move is to take what’s working internally and bring it to every resident. The Ask Raleigh portal will soon integrate Ral-E and Alli, helping residents navigate services, ask better questions, and get answers faster.

“One of the challenges in local government is that residents don’t always know what to ask,” Stagner says. “The goal is to guide them like someone who’s been through it before.”

That leads to fewer calls. Faster answers. And problems solved before they ever reach the help desk.

“The turning point is moving from responding to requests to preventing them,” says Wittenburg. “ServiceNow lets us use AI to spot issues earlier and take action before people ever need to call.”

That’s the direction Raleigh is heading. And for a city growing by 75 people a day, it’s the only math that works.

“Residents shouldn’t have to figure out how the city works,” says Wittenburg. “The city should work for them.”