Managing access requests manually creates real problems. It's error-prone and inconsistent, and slow resolution times hurt employee productivity when they can't access the tools they need. Without a centralized system, requests are scattered across emails and corporate chat channels, and tickets can easily fall through the cracks, creating compliance risks. 

That's why many IT teams turn to automated access request management platforms. These handle the entire process through a single, centralized system, intelligently routing requests to the right approvers, collecting key details upfront (like the reason for the request and how long access is needed), automatically provisioning and de-provisioning access, and maintaining a detailed audit trail at every step.

Up next, we’ll dive deeper into: 

• What is access request management? 
• The problem with managing access requests manually
• How Risotto streamlines access request management (backed by case studies) 
• Key questions you should consider when choosing an access request management system 

What Is Access Request Management? 

Access request management is the structured process of controlling, authorizing, and auditing user access to the systems and applications employees need to do their jobs.

It spans the full lifecycle of an access request: from the initial request through routing approvals to managers, to automated provisioning, and to eventual de-provisioning when access is no longer needed. 

For IT leaders, access request management sits at the intersection of three critical priorities: 

1. IT scalability
2. Employee productivity
3. Security and compliance 

The Problem with Managing Access Requests Manually

If your team is managing access requests through a manual process, you've likely run into these problems:

• Drowning in requests: As companies grow in size, so does the volume of access requests — but IT teams rarely grow at the same pace. The result is an ever-expanding manual workload that pulls IT staff away from the strategic work that actually moves the business forward. A structured process is what separates teams that stay ahead of demand from those that are permanently reactive.

• Requests falling through the cracks: When access requests are scattered across Slack channels, email threads, and direct messages, things inevitably get missed. An overlooked request means an employee has to wait days longer than necessary. And an untracked approval creates significant compliance risks. A centralized process ensures every request is tracked, routed, and resolved — with a complete audit trail every step of the way. 

• Slow resolution hurts employee productivity: When employees are waiting for access, work stops. A new hire who can't get into their tools on day one, or an existing employee waiting days on a routine approval, isn't just frustrated — they're blocked. For urgent, time-sensitive work, that delay has an immediate business cost. An automated process eliminates the wait; employees get access quickly without chasing anyone down, and IT spends less time on requests and more time on work that actually matters.

How Risotto Streamlines Access Request Management 

Risotto is our AI IT agent that automates IGA through a single support funnel, integrating with the tools your team already uses.

• Slack-native from day one: Employees submit access requests in plain language through Slack, Teams, email, or whatever communication tool they already use. From there:
  
  • Risotto chats with them conversationally in real time to gather necessary details (including justification and duration).
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  • Routes approval requests to the right manager(s) directly in Slack.
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  • Once approved, Risotto automates the full lifecycle: provisioning access immediately and automatically de-provisioning it when the time window expires for just-in-time (JIT) requests, including sending optional notifications when time is set to expire.  
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  • On the backend, you can easily configure role-based access control (RBAC) rules, leverage segregation of duties (SoD) with Risotto’s advanced approval engine, create dynamic multi-step approval workflows, and maintain least-privilege principles.  

• Seamless bi-directional existing ticketing systems, including Jira, Zendesk, Freshservice, ServiceNow, and others. Because Risotto is laser-focused on one specific use case — automated AI tier-1 ticket resolution — you can layer it on top of your existing systems without ripping and replacing anything. This enables operational efficiency. 

• Complete audit trail for compliance: Risotto maintains detailed, timestamped records of who requested what, who approved it, when access was granted, when it was revoked, and more. This means your team is always audit-ready. No manual record-keeping, no scrambling to reconstruct access history when a compliance review comes around.

Per the below customer case studies, most IT teams achieve tier-1 ticket automation rates between 20–60+% with Risotto:

• Ironclad: Automated nearly 90% of access-related IT requests
• Fundrise: Automated nearly 60% of IT support tickets
• Gusto: Automated nearly 55% of IT support tickets
• Superhuman: Automated nearly 20% of IT support tickets
• ThoughtSpot: Automated nearly 48% of IT support tickets
• Trust & Will: Automated nearly 35% of IT support tickets
• Jobber: Automated nearly 38% of IT support tickets 
• Hazel Health: Improved deflection rates from 3–5% to over 20%
• Shakepay: Automated nearly 40% of IT support tickets
• Retool: Reduced SLA resolution time from an average of 2 days to under 1 day
• Vidyard: Automated nearly 56% of IT support tickets

Risotto also automates well beyond access requests. We offer pre-built workflows for other major IT ticket categories out of the box: knowledge questions (e.g., "What's the Wi-Fi password?"), password resets, MDM actions (e.g., Jamf, Kandji), and HRIS-connect flows for HR — all ready to deploy in hours, not weeks or months.

Next, we’ll take a look at several case studies highlighting the benefits of Risotto for access request management. 

Ironclad Case Study

Key result: By implementing Risotto for access request management, Ironclad achieved a 90% automation rate across access-related IT requests, with 40–50 applications fully integrated into intelligent access workflows.

The challenge: Ironclad's lean IT team was supporting 600 employees and drowning in an ocean of tickets. The help desk was processing 100–150 tickets per week, with monthly volume climbing toward 1,000 requests. 60–70% of those tickets were access-related:

The problem with how they managed access requests before Risotto: Ironclad relied on manual spreadsheet tracking of applications, approvers, and system groups. The process was especially fragile during coverage gaps, when team members unfamiliar with specific workflows would rush through requests and miss critical details. The process was also prone to human error. 

As Toby Stewart, IT Engineering Manager at Ironclad, put it:

‍"Managing access requests manually is never a good idea because it's error prone, inconsistent, and your time-to-resolution suffers."

Why other tools didn't make the cut: Before choosing Risotto, Ironclad evaluated both AI support tools and dedicated IGA platforms, and ran into the same two problems with each.

1. Most AI support tools didn't actually resolve access requests end-to-end. Simple requests became multi-step confirmation loops that defeated the entire purpose of automation. 

"The problem we faced is other AI support bots were not confident in themselves. If you asked, 'Can I have access to Salesforce?' it would respond, 'Do you want access to Salesforce?' Or worse, it wouldn't find the app at all."

– Toby Stewart, IT Engineering Manager at Ironclad

2. Dedicated IGA platforms required employees to navigate to an external portal, creating a fragmented experience that clashed with a core principle guiding Ironclad's evaluation: "If we wouldn't use it, we wouldn't make other people use it."

Risotto solved both issues: 

Risotto automated 90% of Ironclad’s access requests from end to end, including provisioning and de-provisioning, requiring minimal IT intervention. 

And because Risotto is Slack-native from day one, adoption was immediate. Employees didn't have to change their behavior; Risotto met them where they already were.

As Toby from Ironclad shared: 

• “We include Risotto in all our onboarding material now, and once people see how useful it is they keep coming back to use it more which is a really good sign.”

• "The IT help desk should be like a drive through. People don't want to wait, they want a quick solution, and Risotto provides that."

For more details, read the full Ironclad case study.
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Fundrise Case Study

Key result: Risotto automated nearly 60% of Fundrise's IT support requests, spanning both access requests and knowledge tickets. 

The challenge: For Fundrise's IT team, access request management was a constant drain. A significant portion of their weekly workload was tied up in repetitive access-related tickets, leaving less time and bandwidth for the strategic work that actually moves the business forward.

How Risotto delivered in two key areas that other solutions lacked:

1. Risotto actually resolved access requests from end to end, rather than deflecting to a link or document. As Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise, shared: 

"When a team member asks, ‘How do I get access to Hightouch?’ they’re not looking for a link or a document; they need immediate, actionable assistance. Risotto intelligently understands the intent behind the request. It confirms existing permissions, coordinates necessary approvals proactively, and automatically provisions access upon approval. This automation significantly speeds up provisioning and improves user satisfaction."

2. Risotto was incredibly easy to set up, and Fundrise experienced immediate automation benefits in hours: 

• "We accomplished nearly the same configuration with Risotto in an hour that took us months with the other company… The speed and simplicity of Risotto’s setup was a great sign that we had made a good decision."
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• "With our old chatbot, every new application required a cumbersome onboarding process through the vendor. Now, adding an application to Risotto takes just a few minutes."

Beyond access requests, Risotto also fully auto-solved a large portion of knowledge-based tickets: 

“Our previous tool summarized whatever it pulled from wiki articles, it didn’t supplement responses with broader LLM knowledge or reasoning. This approach fell short because it lacked the capability to fully understand user intent or supplement answers with external knowledge, Risotto, however, synthesizes information from multiple inputs to provide context-aware, accurate, and actionable responses.”

– Phillip Rickett, Head of IT, Fundrise

Risotto also automatically learns from every resolved ticket and Slack interaction, so your team doesn’t have to answer the same question twice: 

“With Risotto, instead of constantly writing new documentation, our team can simply answer questions, and Risotto learns as we go.”

– Phillip Rickett, Head of IT, Fundrise

For more details, read the full Fundrise case study.

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Superhuman Case Study

Key result: Risotto automated nearly 20% of Superhuman's IT support tickets, including access requests and knowledge-based tickets, with an average first response time of just seconds.

As Collin, Legal & Compliance Manager at Superhuman, shared:

“Automated software access saves us so much time. Within minutes people get the access they need with everything tracked, approved, and no additional overhead needed.”

The challenge: In just 18 months, Superhuman grew from 100 to over 140 employees. As headcount climbed, so did the volume of access requests coming through Slack — overstretching a lean IT & Compliance team that had no practical way to scale manual processes to keep up.

Why their existing solution wasn't working: Superhuman previously used a Slack bot from their IT provider that created more friction than it removed. Every request required employees to enter details manually that the system should have already known. And even after all of that, provisioning still required manual intervention from IT and could take hours to complete.

Why they chose Risotto: 

1. The implementation experience & time-to-value: Superhuman worked directly with our co-founder Alex Confer, a former IT engineering lead at Gusto and Dropbox, who understood their needs firsthand. He met with them weekly throughout the onboarding process, ensuring quick setup and time-to-value.

2. Time-based access capabilities: Risotto makes it easy to monitor permissions and stay compliant through time-based access controls. As Collin at Superhuman shared: 

"For sensitive tools and resources, Risotto's automated time-based access has been a game-changer."

3. Multi-department capabilities: What started as a solution for IT quickly expanded across the organization. Risotto now handles requests for compliance, finance, and HR/people operations at Superhuman. Additional departments are also looking to implement Risotto. As Collin shared:

"The multi-department capabilities are awesome. Our engineering and RevOps teams now also want to use Risotto as they also get lots of the same questions over and over again.”

For more details, read the full Superhuman case study.
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ThoughtSpot Case Study

Key result: Risotto automated nearly 48% of ThoughtSpot's IT support tickets, reducing average resolution time from 31 hours to 6.5 hours. 

The challenge: At ThoughtSpot, a lean IT team of just a handful of people was responsible for supporting over 1,000 employees, handling roughly 50–60 support requests per day. 

The majority of tickets were access-related and required multiple manual steps: triage, approval routing, follow-up communications, and final execution. Without a centralized system, requests would get lost in Slack threads, frustrating both employees and IT staff. 

As Jason Huey, Senior IT Systems Administrator at ThoughtSpot, shared:

"The biggest gripe that our users had was that they would put in a ticket and it would just be lost into the ether for a couple days, and they would have to actually be the ones to bump it or get our attention on it."

Why other solutions fell short: ThoughtSpot evaluated several tools before choosing Risotto. Each presented the same fundamental problem: significant configuration overhead with limited immediate value. For a team already stretched thin, these tools would have created more work than the benefits they delivered.

Why they chose Risotto:

• ‍Fast, painless implementation: Unlike the tools they had previously evaluated, Risotto was up and running in under a week.

• ‍End-to-end access request automation: Risotto eliminated the manual approval processes and communication delays that caused access requests to drag on for days. Most access requests are now completed within 24 hours, with automated follow-ups ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Risotto also delivered significant benefits in compliance and reporting, which proved especially valuable during SOC2 audits.

Another key benefit of Risotto is that our AI agent auto-learns and gets smarter over time, ensuring you never answer the same question twice. As Jason shared: 

“One special thing about Risotto is it’s constantly improving with every question. We see it getting better and better every day.”

For more details, read the full ThoughtSpot case study.

Gusto Case Study

Key result: On average, Risotto auto-solved 55% of Gusto's IT support tickets and reduced average resolution time from 35 hours to 5 hours — saving 114,000 hours of support wait time. The same lean team now handles twice the ticket volume.

As Jose Izquierdo, Head of AIT Operations at Gusto, shared: 

"We came to Risotto hoping to hold the line — but the results blew away our expectations. We doubled our resolution rate on day one, and it hasn't dropped since."

The challenge: Gusto set out to become AI-native, starting with internal IT support, which was fielding roughly 3,000 requests every month. Jose’s team lost hours to troubleshooting and access provisioning, leaving little time for the strategic AI initiatives that would define Gusto's competitive edge. 

Why previous solutions fell short: The team had spent years running a chatbot to field tier-1 tickets, but it couldn't keep pace with Gusto's new standard. It lacked the continuous learning, integration depth, and flexibility needed to scale automation across a growing enterprise organization. 

Why they chose Risotto:

• ‍Fast deployment with zero downtime: Risotto seamlessly integrated with Jira, Slack, Confluence, and Okta, fully deploying in two weeks with no disruption. Within hours of going live, Risotto's AI agent began auto-solving tier-1 tickets.

• ‍End-to-end ticket resolution in Slack via a conversational format, mimicking the experience of chatting with a human IT agent. 

"Employees can get help directly within Slack. They can kick off workflows for getting access to any internal tool, ask any HR-related question, or resolve questions about GitHub repository access, all without leaving Slack.”

– Jose Izquierdo, Head of AIT Operations at Gusto 

Risotto also documents every exchange for complete audit trails, providing operational oversight without manually tracking or worrying about SOC 2 compliance gaps.

For more details, read the full Gusto case study.

Key Questions You Should Ask When Choosing an Access Request Management Solution  

Below is a brief breakdown of the key criteria to evaluate when choosing an access request management platform, along with customer quotes on how Risotto performs in each area. 

Note: For a deeper dive on this topic, see our full breakdown of the Best Access Request Management Systems & Tools.

Can it integrate with existing ticketing systems, including Jira, Freshservice, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and others?

Risotto was purpose-built to work alongside your existing ticketing system from day one — not replace it. 

Out of the box, Risotto syncs bi-directionally with Jira, Freshservice, Zendesk, ServiceNow, and others, adding a powerful AI ticket resolution layer on top of the tools your team already uses. No migration, no rip-and-replace, no wrestling with configuration.

In the background, Risotto automatically manages the end-to-end ticket lifecycle, including: 

• Ticket creation 
• Titling 
• Categorizing  
• Tagging 
• Routing 
• Initial triage 

As Tom Grinberg, IT Manager at Trust & Will, shared: 

“Risotto became the orchestration layer for Jira Service Management and gives us instant automation with AI… We always wanted to require a reason for application access, but it was really difficult to integrate that into JSM. Risotto adds that functionality to JSM and so much more.”

Does it offer native integration with Slack, where employees are already accustomed to requesting access? 

Our IGA solution lives directly within Slack, Teams, and email — wherever your employees already work. There are no new portals to learn, no separate tools to log into, and no context switching, driving higher adoption. 

As several of our customers shared:

"Other IGA solutions felt clunky to set up and maintain. There was a lot of overhead to maintain them and they weren't embedded in the help desk, so you're solving one problem but creating another… we include Risotto in all our onboarding material now, and once people see how useful it is they keep coming back to use it more which is a really good sign.”

– Toby Stewart, IT Engineering at Ironclad

“We want AI to seamlessly fit into our team’s daily operations, meeting our users where they already work… Risotto’s minimal operational overhead and integration into Slack has enabled us to achieve exactly that.”

– Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

“We wanted to implement more standardization and automation in our help desk, but there wasn’t an easy way in Slack without clunky custom work. Risotto helped us do that.”

– Vergil Smith, IT Manager at Vidyard 

“Risotto has been super popular internally, it’s a much improved experience for employees to get answers and problems solved immediately.”

– Tom Grinberg, IT Manager at Trust & Will

What does the implementation process entail, and what is the time-to-value? 

Unlike legacy tools that try to be everything for everyone, Risotto was built with a singular focus: auto-solving repetitive tier-1 tickets. Our prebuilt workflows enable enterprise IT teams to be up and running in hours, not weeks or months.

We also provide guided onboarding led by former IT practitioners, including co-founder Alex Confer, who previously led IT engineering at Dropbox and Gusto. As we explore in our origin story, we’ve been in your shoes, and implementation is grounded in what IT teams actually need. 

As several of our customers shared: 

“Risotto is one of the easiest tools I’ve implemented. We were up and running in less than a week and already seeing our first autosolves... getting Risotto integrated with Jira, Slack, and Okta was so seamless and fast.”

– Jason Huey, Senior IT Systems Administrator at ThoughtSpot

“With our old chatbot, every new application required a cumbersome onboarding process through the vendor. Now, adding an application to Risotto takes just a few minutes.”

– Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

“Ease of deployment was huge. We didn’t need a consultant or months of configuration. Risotto just worked.”

– Peter Hadjisavas, Head of IT at Hazel Health

"Risotto had the most thorough onboarding experience I've ever been a part of. Alex was great — he met with us weekly and made it very easy to quickly get up and running."

– Collin Clifford, Legal & Compliance Manager at Superhuman

“​​Working with the Risotto team was awesome from day one. They all have IT backgrounds and really cared about making us successful.”

– Tom Grinberg, IT Manager at Trust & Will

Can it handle the full spectrum of tier-1 tickets beyond access requests? 

As we’ve shared, Risotto also automates well beyond access requests. We offer pre-built workflows for other major IT ticket categories out of the box: knowledge questions, password resets, MDM actions (e.g., Jamf, Kandji), and HRIS-connect flows for HR — all ready to deploy in hours, not weeks or months.

As several of our customers have shared: 

“Our previous tool summarized whatever it pulled from wiki articles, it didn’t supplement responses with broader LLM knowledge or reasoning. This approach fell short because it lacked the capability to fully understand user intent or supplement answers with external knowledge… Risotto, however, synthesizes information from multiple inputs to provide context-aware, accurate, and actionable responses.”

– Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

“Risotto was able to combine knowledge from different sources and give me an instant answer to a complex question, which was awesome to watch."

– Jason Huey, Senior IT Systems Administrator at ThoughtSpot

“It was amazing to see Risotto solve questions for me when I was out of the office, and our employees loved getting answers instantly.”

– Collin Clifford, Legal & Compliance Manager at Superhuman

Does it get smarter over time by learning from past resolved tickets and Slack updates in designated channels? 

When an agent resolves a ticket in Slack, Risotto automatically learns from their response, so the same question never requires manual handling twice. With your approval, Risotto can also learn from designated Slack channels, keeping knowledge current without requiring constant KB updates.

In the example above, taken from the Superhuman case study:

• Jessica asks in Slack: "Hey, when's our next audit for SOC 2?"
• Risotto accurately replies with information it learned not just from your KB, but also from Slack: "The next SOC 2 audit will start in July and the observation period should last three months."
• Jessica confirms her issue is resolved.

As some of our customers shared:

“The killer feature for us was that it could effortlessly learn and capture knowledge that our team creates every day in Slack… with Risotto, instead of constantly writing new documentation, our team can simply answer questions, and Risotto learns as we go.”

– Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

“The more we use Risotto, the smarter it gets, that’s what makes it different from every other tool we’ve tried.”

– Peter Hadjisavas, Head of IT at Hazel Health 

“One special thing about Risotto is it’s constantly improving with every question. We see it getting better and better every day.”

– Jason Huey, Senior IT Systems Administrator at ThoughtSpot

Can it scale beyond IT to support other departments? 

While IT is typically the first team to adopt Risotto, other departments across the organization (e.g., HR, Finance, Legal, Sales, Engineering) also implement our AI agent to auto-solve their own repetitive tier-1 tickets.

For non-technical teams, Risotto offers an intuitive built-in ticketing system, meeting their needs without the complexity or cost of traditional tools. 

Setup is quick and painless, and Risotto intelligently auto-routes tickets to the correct department and person. Also, all the information stays siloed (e.g., HR doesn’t have visibility into IT’s tickets and knowledge docs, and vice versa).  

As some of our customers shared:

Once you add in HR our combined automation rate is even higher at 50.2%.”

– Jason Huey, Senior IT Systems Administrator at ThoughtSpot

"The multi-department capabilities are awesome. Our engineering and RevOps teams now also want to use Risotto as they also get lots of the same questions over and over again.”

– Collin Clifford, Legal & Compliance Manager at Superhuman

"Risotto started autosolving tickets immediately. Within the first few weeks, we saw departments that had never tracked ticket requests before, like our Cloud team, asking to get on the platform and streamline their support function."

– Erik Van Dijk, Senior IT Manager at Jobber

Interested in Learning More About Risotto’s Access Request Management Capabilities? 

Risotto deploys in hours (not weeks or months) via an intuitive self-service dashboard, integrates with the tools your team already uses, and auto-solves 20–60+% of tier-1 IT tickets. Our IAM platform automates the access request process, enables quicker provisioning, and reduces bottlenecks. It frees your IT team for higher-value work. 

We invite you to: 

• Schedule a demo call
• Read our origin story
• Explore customer stories