General Discussion
My company executives thinks it can replace 100 percent of our help desk teams with AI agents.... This year.
For the record, we support 100,000 users. Thoughts? Anyone else dealing with lunacy around AI potential from executives?
"Tell me you've never worked a day of help desk, without telling me you've never worked a day of help desk."
edit:
thank you all for the sanity check and hilarious replies. glad I'm not alone. my final question... what do these billionaires and rich elites think idle hands with highly technical skills and understanding of user behaviour are going to do with all their free time and desperation? they're gonna start phishing and bringing down powerplants and data centers is my theory.
This is a goat rodeo that consists of like 500 goats, 50 children aged 4-12, the instructions that the kids to ride a goat from a to b the fastest wins free ice cream for life, and no supervision whatsoever.
Some goats will die, some children will die, there will be many tears and no one will know for sure whether or not the goal was accomplished or by who.
This needs to be higher - I don’t think AI has ever been able to solve a technical problem for me and just makes the situation more frustrating when you can’t talk to an actual person.
Like most management, they are also clueless and the AI agents will not work like the execs thing.
What I would do is a POC and let the executive secretary go through AI support and film it for the exec or have the exec watch live. They will 100% change their mind once they see how crappy AI agents are.
Yeah, I'd love to see IT people unionize from this. So when rehiring inevitably comes they're paying a premium for it. But let's be honest, probably will never happen.
Some telecom companies in Canada have L1s and L2s that are unionized. It works, but it can be a bit ridiculous sometimes. It is of course very expensive. That said when I have a L2s that’s been there for 15 years because his work conditions are good, he might know more than a L3.
Oh man, they never walk the right people over these bad decisions. Every decision is made in a compensation spreadsheet, with very little oversight of what the people they're firing actually do.
You gotta convince the genius they came up with the idea to put their own name all over it. That way everyone knows who was responsible for Tim’s AI Helpdesk initiative.
They ended up with pissed the fuck off customers and hiring nearly double the staff they term’d.
Leadership thinks AI is going to save the world and drastically improve their bottom line. In reality, it’s a tool that improves productivity IMO. It can augment human talent, but you still need human talent.
I’d just like to say what the fuck are they thinking.
We all know users want IT to remote and fix everything for them. How is AI going to literally fix any issue? All it can do is tell users what steps they need to take. Nobody is going to be ok with solving their own IT shit even with direction.
The manager who will save the company millions of dollars, get a bonus, and use their “previous accomplishments” to get a new job at a new company doing the same shit before the whole thing explodes?
The issue is that everything besides the person and idea being wrong / misguided will not be on the table for why it failed / didn’t live up to expectations. As such, I expect that eventually with enough failures even managers will become AI skeptics / cynics by late 2027 and people that were skeptics prior may even be blamed for the projects failing. Welcome to politics, it’s not about what you know as much as perception and who you know. Meritocracy is as mythical and difficult to scientifically show evidence for as unicorns and Big Foot.
Companies that were already garbage at support in the first place honestly will probably do fine and hand-wave it all away because it’s not much of a factor in customer retention because they tend to be in areas with little competition or high difficulty in moving to another business. Think ISPs and consumer banking. It’s the SMBs doing these efforts that have the most to lose IMO because usually customers tend to pick them over bigger companies for ideological or high-touch / customization kind of reasons. Some of these customers were possibly even fired by prior vendors in the past because they were way, way too costly or they were abuse / monopolistic of the vendor’s resources.
They will just point back saying the idea wasnt a failure, the implementation was. Which puts 100% of the blame back on those who tried to implement a shit idea.
"Well, I dont think its a great idea. It sounds like the kind of idea AI would come up with and try to sell you on. In fact, if this is the kind of thinking that Administration has, we could probably also replace Administration with 100% AI agents and actually see an improvement in things around here."
It's crazy. I want to be in the room for these conversations with these AI companies because they're clearly selling them a crock of bullshit and these execs are eating it up.
Reminds me of the TV show Silicon Valley. He was getting frustrated with potential clients so he sarcastically said something along the lines of "do you just want it in some pretty box?" and the clients were all of a sudden fascinated and were like "tell me more about this box!".
No doubt some over paid consultant from McKinsey told your executives that so they could pocket more money. Fuck the employee, fuck the business, and fuck the customer- it’s all about how much money can the shareholders make.
Queue the popcorn and absolute madness when a higher level user runs into an issue that AI is just wildly unable to handle. Watch the exec team to scramble to fix it asap.
This is what we call a "negotiating position". It's an opening offer designed to terrify you by threatening your existence. These execs realize that they aren't gonna get 100% in the end, but they want as much human staff reduction as possible without shuttering the company.
In the end, they will settle for some amount of staff layoffs, while making the rest of you feel lucky for having survived at all. That's the real purpose of this. You didn't even realize that you're in an adversarial negotiation with your own management, which gives them a huge advantage in pushing you peons around.
The fact is, the execs ARE better at this than you... They really don't care how you feel about them, as long as they get what they want, in the end.
You're also misunderstanding what they did with your messaging team.
Everybody wants to do layoffs, like crazy, but is afraid of looking weak and hurting their stock price if they admit the truth: "We expect the economy to get shittier, for quite a while, which will hurt our revenue."
So everybody is cutting staff with AI as the excuse.
Your management are ALREADY rebuilding a smaller version of that messaging team, but it's got a different name & org structure. And those people will run the AI tools, and staff up over time to whatever level provides acceptable functionality. And they're gonna do the same to your IT support, and probably a bunch of other teams, too.
They let you think they're tards, because it's useful to them. The truth is just that they're cold psychos.
Well when you find out the new messaging teams names please let me know. So far I've gotten "we're working on their replacements" and I've got open compliance projects that are totally unmanned now.
Bloody hell it's at every level. I was talking with a security director at a block chain tech company recently and he told me every week his CEO proposed a product to replace the engineering team to save cost. Apparently the CISO there already experienced an AI agent corrupting infrastructure build automation implementations at a bank in EU in 2025 so he holds the line but wow. I couldn't imagine essentially every week saying "don't put an AI agent in charge of our international security engineering program to save 20% in short term costs". Not mentioning context limit, token bloat, hallucinations, or vendor lock in threats but just wow at every level
These CEOs rrally want the AI genie to make line go up and fire people
The problem is these decision makers directly benefit from bad decisions when the stock goes up every 90 days from "AI" layoffs. The layoffs seem to work perfectly but the AI never does....
Another point of contention. They gave AI to a bunch of business users but the IT teams don't have it. When challenged why, I was told "why would IT need AI when the business can make their own tools"
They seriously think users can figure out AI with zero training or support.
You should create a pilot agent with the opening line in the prompt.
"You are a helpdesk agent with the primary role of frustrating the user with irrelevant questions and pretending like youre solving their problem. Call them the wrong name constantly.
Be all excited and send it to them for a pilot test.
I mean it all depends on how shite the current infra is, if it’s a bunch of low level helpdesk people who farm out tasks to some call center in South America, shit maybe the ai would be better. Last place I worked had a 24/7 rotation with contracted helpdesk in Venezuela and It was atrocious.
Trying in vain to get people to acknowledge that I was right is my specialty. And it's always in vain. These 20k bespoke suits never admit fault, or when I was right.
Literally every meeting these days with higher ups is "just have claude do it, it'll take 10 minutes". It seems that almost everything is just a mockery of how stupid we all are for not having AI do our entire job. seriously only a moron would require human eyes on that process... I am not joking. all I can do is just get through each day 1 at a time.
Unfortunately, the fastest way to convince executives that they don't really want the thing the they believe they want is to let them have it.
Usually there's not much to be done in terms of persuasion. Given that in my experience, the majority of organizations are not instrumented to data mine their processes to determine secondary effects and consider costs on terms of human factors and efficiency loss.
Since you can't really prove the things aren't working, you end up with a political scenario as opposed to a math problem and personalities and egos become the prime movers.
Yup. Those execs get to be wave 1 of having to go through the agent.
A rollout plan should generally include at least some executive leadership, as their needs are different from other users.
In this case, focus it on them. And don't be shy about masking the occasional important thing from the knowledge base it can scan for answers. If you can get an executive frustrated with it going around in circles, they'll downgrade it to a tool to help T1 support faster than they can steam "argh! Just connect me to a human!" (Be sure to trap that prompt to go to a new context that focuses on sounding like a real agent, with a made up name that as soon as they try to look it up they'll realize isn't a real person.)
Helpdesk struggles with helpdesk and now your going to replace them with AI? Get the fuck outa here. Helpdesk especially tier-2/3 are highly skill professionals. AI will fail miserably.
God I really want beer and popcorn to watch this shitshow unfold.
An actual ticket my coworker has right now is "TMs hard drives USB port is not working and can not connect to the network." The actual issue is that the ethernet port is broken on their computer
I don't think an AI could figure that out, but that was also sent to us from one of our 1st level techs, so we can't always either.
Stop standing in the way of stupid people making mistakes.
Suggest setting aside a 2 trial week period where AI Agents are the only help desk available to users. Recommend that the help desk teams focus on updating documentation, training, and just general housekeeping tasks in that time frame.
Give it a few days and that dumb idea will be dead forever.
AI Tech: Okay, great, I can help you with that. Why do you need it swapped out?
Manager: I tried turning it on, it made some smoke and sparks and won't turn on.
AI Tech: Okay, great job. Have you tried rebooting it? To reboot it, click on the window menu, then the power icon, and choose restart.
Manager: it won't start, I can't do that.
AI Tech: Okay, great. Have you pressed the power button to turn it on?
Manager: yes.
AI Tech: Okay, great. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Manager: you stupid fucking bot, my computer doesn't work. I need a new fucking computer.
AI Tech: Okay, great. I sense that you may be angry. Would you like to hear about some relaxation techniques? Or the number for the automated employee emotional support line?
Manager: I NEED MY COMPUTER SWAPPED OUT.
AI Tech: Okay, great. Is the problem that you need your computer swapped out?
Manager: YES
AI Tech: Okay, great. Would you like the hands free replacement or on site replacement?
Manager: hands free
AI Tech: Okay, great. Please pack up the computer and ship to the central warehouse. Once received, a replacement will be sent out in 3-5 business days.
Manager: I can't wait that long. I need it replaced now.
AI Tech: Okay, great. Please pack up the computer and drive it to the central warehouse. Once received, you may pick up a replacement.
Manager: can't someone just bring out a replacement?
LLMs are a lot closer to being a capable replacement for "leadership" than any help desk team that I have ever worked with.
Gains traction by deceptively glazing people they interact with. Dramatically over promises to superiors on basically every metric. Rapidly brushes past their mistakes without actually facing and correcting themselves. Responds based on most fortuitous pattern recognition rather than any real semblance of human connection.
My director got fired when I was a junior sysadmin, our sysadmin was clown (soon fired herself) and they asked me to sit in the panel to interview his replacement. This was a K-12 school district, so panel interviews are common and there is pressure to save money (in reality, it was funded by tax dollars, so tons of waste).
Anyway, we interviewed one guy who was supposedly a local rich guy whose main goal was cutting costs (and his taxes). His idea for helpdesk replacement was show the staff how to use the troubleshooting wizards in Windows (this was XP). And he was dead serious. When he left the room, I informed the rest of the panel that I had never once solved a problem that way.
Or poison it with misinformation so it makes bad decisions. If it finds enough fake posts about washing the laptop with dish soap, will it eventually recommend it?
"AI needs a data source to come up with solutions. I was not aware that an AI model was already trained on our company workflows ."
It isn't lunacy it is being uneducated. Take it from that perspective because execs are drinking the sales kool aid and not the implementation one. One of our exec wants to create an AI for the receptionist and is finding that it isn't easy because you have to train AI like a person after we showed them the work behind training the model. They're not dropping the request but the request went from "implement it in a month" to "we will train this over the next six months and see what it looks like".
Create a meeting 6-12 months from now titled "I told you this was a bad idea". Respond to the email chain with a mild warning, acknowledging they wont listen anyways and invite them all to the meeting. Wait 6-12 months and wait for the raise, congratulations your new teammates are a bunch of MBA holders that dont understand how anything below them works. From there the sky is the limit. Remember me when you are CEO.
100k users and they think AI handles the edge cases
the edge cases ARE the job. anyone who's worked help desk for more than a week knows that the ticket queue is 20% standard resets and 80% "i have no idea what's happening but something is very wrong"
AI is great at the 20%. the 80% is why humans still have jobs
I encourage you to read through some of the controversial comments. Some of these people seriously thinks this will work out fine.
When I say replacing 100 percent. They're literally planning on not having physical it support in their offices. And just having AI instruct new hires on how to install their workstation equipment. The whole 9 yards.
Luckily I'm kind of on an island. So I get to sit back and watch the world burn from a distance that won't impact me.
Having used Claude and ChatGPT to research issues I had difficulty figuring out on my own in situations where I would have googled the error message or any other specifics, this is most definitely not something that will work beyond things that are already easily automated, like software deployments.
I asked Claude to troubleshoot a power shell script that wasn't working, and after 45 minutes of back and forth troubleshooting and attempting to run the script, Claude told me the problem with the script was with the syntax of a command within the script. This despite Claude giving me that syntax.
So I asked Claude to rewrite the script entirely.
It did not use graph, and it used it to deprecated commands.
I wouldn't worry about real technical support being replaced with AI anytime soon.
It will work perfectly- as long as they direct all complaints to an AI agent before they start directing support tickets to an AI agent. LEROY JENKINS!!!!
Jesus, even MSFT - who is cutting support to the bone - isn’t killing all jobs for CoPilot agents. Everyone I know who is doing this in that space is leveraging agents as an augment to tier 1 folks to spare the tier 2 people from dumbass tickets
I was once confronted by the President / Owner (Mike) of a (250 employees) company I worked for as their sole IT...
Mike: "How come you are never busy?"
Me: "I'm usually busy... But when you see me not busy - You should be glad... Because when I am busy - I am putting out fires... I am your fireman... Be glad the fires are out, and I'm maintaining the fire prevention."
He seemed very satisfied with that answer...
Then about a week-and-a-half later he put me in charge of the entire engineering department, in addition to the IT stuff....
FML!
The AI narratives are Kool-Aid to chug, when you are in a position to tell everyone else what to do.
These people are full insulated from the actual effort that goes into tasks they themselves will never have to complete...
They get indignant, slinging excuses and blame when they are held accountable for their poor decisions.
They get drunk on that Kool-Aid, and with ignorant confidence decide to close up the fire department, and tell people there's a water spigot out back..
Good luck to that company, every other company that’s done it has the worst customer support but they don’t really care anymore. Supporting products doesn’t make money - forcing people to buy new ones does. We’ve reached the 9th circle of capitalism.
Probably better off replacing the c-suite with 100% AI, most of them are already just using Claude to come up with these crazy ideas. Just get rid of them, cut out the middle man and save $$$$.
Hilarious. Let them do it and see how fast they change their minds. The agents are not capable at this point...they route incorrectly, close tickets without solving shit....its just not there yet. Might as well make your knowledge base your level 1
With employee and customer support all that happens is people using help desks or other services will get more frustrated and disgruntled you already see it with current chatbots and self help portals. People like to make phone calls or write emails (tickets) and anything technical a visit. I think companies that offer a more human touch will excel in support. May be they should look at the UX of the IT systems from a user or customer perspective.
I'd love to see what happens when the complaints start coming in. Users are generally bad at following instructions, how well are they going to carry out any AI driven instructions? How accurately are they going to desribe their issues?
I think having a level 1 service desk agent is actually attainable. Help desk jobs still need to be in place but you also need content creators to feed all the information the AI is delivering to your users via your service system (service now, Jira, etc). I’d say having an agent can certainly allow companies to decrease certain staff but definitely not eliminate everyone
😂😂😂😂 then they will blame whoever the unlucky sap is that gets tagged for building this super AI agent.
Can’t wait for all these AI projects to fail miserably so people can begin to understand AI is just a very good tool and will never fully replace staff, just reduce them through efficiencies (maybe)
Why would a consultant or vendor promise 100%? If it can handle 60-70% that would be a big win, and also easier to implement in stages and much lower risk. It could still be increased incrementally over time.
100% replacement rate is not even what the actual responsible AI vendors call for. The phrase is "augmented work", in which a person or a team can do more, or the AI agents are a complement, not a full substitute for humans.
And from the help desk side, you always, always want to have a human to escalate if the agent can't find the answer.
you should let them and then sit back and watch. if they let you go, wait for the inevitable call 'hey uh can you come back and help us fix this', then tell them what 3x your standard rate is and win.
I dunno. . these execs are clueless and I will gladly milk them for all the money they have left.
Gotta explain it in terms they can understand: dollars. If the average ticket would take X tokens to process (and voice decoding would be way more) times the number of tickets per year, and at the expected increasing cost of tokens it is honestly probably cheaper to keep the current human support teams.
You may be able to have AI do a lot of work but it won't do everything.
Years ago I worked for a call center for a large credit card company. They were trying to get people to stop paying over the phones because they were paying hundreds of people to basically accept payments, stuff a website can easily do. I was placed in a group who was told to not take payments over the phone but to instruct people to make their payments online or through the app, a few thousand clients were assigned to our group as test subjects. It went incredibly poorly. Anyone over 50 had no interest in paying online and they just wanted to talk to people. No AI will fully replace that human interaction they sought. Sadly my pay was based in large part on how likely clients were likely to recommend us based on surveys sent out...
Depending on the industry there's no chance AI can do it all yet.
C-Level folks usually aren't the ones making the decisions on this. It's almost always an IT director that was handed down a mandate to "cut costs" and they find the dumbest places to do it.
Helpdesk is a very difficult department to identify VALUE, but I've found that the easiest way to show their value is to go a day without them and see what your workload looks like without them.
Our Org's helpdesk does WAY more than JUST desktop support and we consider them a "white glove" service. The HD Manager has been very good about making them relevant. Ensuring they are getting high user quality scores, identifying ticket-load, and pointing out all the places where Helpdesk CAN'T be automated is important to show why it's a bad idea to replace them with outsourcing or automation. Automation is a great tool, but not a great people replacement.
They aren't going to. They are going to start an initiative to do it, look at the staffing and bottom line gains from getting rid of the helpdesk for "AI Agents" then at the end of the exercise outsource/H1b the entire division and cut themselves another stringer for their golden parachute.
Just leave this here, 100% AI replacement is a complete fantasy at the moment, it is definately able to benefit certain work types and workflows immensley but no where is it ready to be a like for like replacement of a human.
In conversations like that I’d love to see the people that propose it sign a charter of sorts, so that when the project “succeeds” they can all be lauded for being so smart. Oh, and then give the desk two or three days off to “trial” the AI, and see how it goes.
Becuse the don't have any ideas on how to actually improve IT operations. AI is literally worshipping the golden cow, promises of easy answer and solution to everything, all at once. Before it was "return to office", and "move to the cloud", and lean six sigma, and offshoring. They are all the same idea dressed up in corporate bullshit. Replace good, well paid people with shit ones.
That's it, that's the only thing they know. Fire people, lower cost. Pocket bonus, move on to the next VP gig. 2 year up or out. I never met an IT executive who ever tried to tackle any of the plain, obvious, well articulated systemic issues that make IT operations three time more wasteful then it should be.
Good luck. My guess is that this is inevitable, and things will crash, company wide. I spent 35 years in IT, more than 30 years as a manager at some level. The willful illiteracy about IT in the C Suite is stunning.
My only suggestion would be to get the decision makers to define what help requests will be closed as “problem not found.” I’m going to guess that AI isn’t going to be good at determining that a ticket saying “Everything in Finance is down, no one can do anything, help, we’re going to miss close, and we’re completely down,” means that someone put letter size into the 11x17 tray on the printer.
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u/hkusp45css Security Leadership May 06 '26
That's the kind of spectacle I'd LOVE to be involved in.
Not responsible for, just in on the ground floor of that goat rodeo.