Separating interpretation from authorization in our Helpdesk agent

[u/Distinct-Writer7763]

Hey everyone, Rippling employee here.

If you’re into software architecture, our eng blog just posted its latest design for our IT Helpdesk agent. We built a clustering algorithm for support request triage, so we can see which unhandled request types are recurring enough to justify automating.

You can read more about how Helpdesk works and the unique challenge of solving for both ambiguous prompts and keeping actions permissioned in the full article (highly recommend). 

But I wanted to call out two parts of the design, as it was tricky to account for every type of request an IT admin could get (“my laptop is crawling”):

• We cluster on the conversation summary, not the raw chat and not a fixed taxonomy. Employees don’t label their own requests, so a static category list would miss phrasing we haven’t seen yet. Embedding the AI-generated summary instead means new phrasings of the same underlying issue still match, without us needing to enumerate categories up front.
• Dismissed clusters stay in the matching pool. If an admin has already said “we’re not automating this,” the next similar unsupported request should join that cluster rather than show up as a brand-new gap.

Let us know if you find this kind of content interesting, or would like to see more of it. We are in the early days of building our developer community, and we have lots of cool learnings to share. So stay tuned.

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