IT automation software offers several benefits, including reduced operational costs, fewer human errors, improved compliance, and increased productivity.

Some common use cases for IT automation software include:

• Automated tier-1 ticket resolution: One of the most impactful use cases for IT automation software, in which a conversational AI chatbot automatically resolves knowledge-based questions, provisions software access, resets passwords, and more. The best solutions integrate directly into your existing tech stack, managing the entire ticket lifecycle and automatically syncing with your ticketing systems.
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• User and access management: Automated onboarding/offboarding, identity and access provisioning, and license or SaaS lifecycle management.
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• Infrastructure and operations: Configuration management, patching, backups, and cloud provisioning.
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• Workflow and process orchestration: Cross-system workflow automation, approvals, and CI/CD pipeline management.

To help you choose the best tool for your needs, we put together this list of the top 10 options, starting with our own IT automation software for tier-1 IT ticket resolution, Risotto.

1. Risotto

Risotto, our conversational AI agent, automatically resolves tier-1 tickets, including knowledge-based questions, software access requests, password resets, and more. 

Most teams automate 20–60% of tier-1 tickets, freeing IT agents to handle higher-value work and scale support without adding headcount.

• Fundrise: Automated nearly 60% of IT support tickets
• Superhuman: Automated nearly 20% of IT support tickets
• Ironclad: Automated nearly 90% of access-related IT requests
• ThoughtSpot: Automated nearly 48% of IT support tickets
• Trust & Will: Automated nearly 35% 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 works directly out of the box in just hours, not weeks or months. Unlike general-purpose automation tools that try to do everything, Risotto was purpose-built by IT for IT to auto-resolve tier-1 tickets with prebuilt workflows.

This was one of the main benefits Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise, noted in our case study: 

Risotto seamlessly integrates with ticketing systems such as Jira, Freshservice, and Zendesk with bi-directional sync, managing the entire ticket lifecycle from ticket creation to titling, tagging, categorizing, routing, initial triage, and more. It can also be used as a standalone ticketing system by non-technical departments like HR, Sales, Legal, and others who also want to automate repetitive support requests.

Next, we’ll dive deeper into:

• How Risotto can be used to automate software access requests, including time-based, approval-based, and self-service requests
• 3 examples of how Risotto intelligently resolves knowledge-based questions 
• Additional advantages of Risotto, backed by customer quotes, including:
  
  • Fast time-to-value with prebuilt workflows and seamless onboarding
  • Seamless integration with your existing tech stack
  • Bi-directional sync with ticketing systems like Jira, Freshservice, and Zendesk.
  • Continuous learning from past tickets and Slack conversations
  • Multi-department capabilities

How Risotto Can Be Used to Automate Software Access Requests

Up next, we’ll take a look at how Risotto handles three different types of access requests: time-based, approval-based, and self-service access requests. 

Time-Based Access Requests

In the above example:

• 🧑‍💼 Logan asks IT in Slack: “Can you give my new team member access to Stripe?”
• 🤖 Risotto replies in the thread: “What level of access does he need?”
• 🧑‍💼 Logan responds: “View only.”
• 🤖 Risotto follows up: “For how long? (1 hour to 90 days)”
• 🧑‍💼 Logan replies: “90 days.”
• 🤖 Risotto processes the request, grants View only access to Stripe for 90 days, and confirms completion in the same Slack thread.

As you can see, our AI agent always asks for justification and keeps a detailed audit log. Risotto can also be configured to send proactive messages ahead of access expiration, reminding the employee that access is going to expire soon and asking if they’d like to extend, as per the example below:

Approval-Based Access Requests

In this example:

• 🧑‍💼 Eli asks in Slack: “Can I get access to Appetize?”
• 🤖 Risotto asks what level of access is needed – Admin, Developer, or User.
• 🧑‍💼 Eli replies: “Developer access, please.”
• 🤖 Risotto asks for a reason to log in the ticket.
• 🧑‍💼 Eli responds: “To test and post iOS builds.”
• 🤖 Risotto requests manager approval, gets approval, and kicks off the account setup.
• 🤖 Risotto confirms: Developer access has been granted and the invite is in Eli’s email.

Self-Service Access Requests

In the example above:

• 🧑‍💼 Maya asks in Slack: “Kai and I need Figma access.”
• 🤖 Risotto asks why they need access.
• 🧑‍💼 Kai answers: “We need to view the roadmap.” Maya confirms she needs the same access.
• 🤖 Risotto processes the request, gets approval, and grants both users access to Figma, letting them know they’re all set directly in Slack.

Customer Quotes Demonstrating Risotto’s Software Access Automation Capabilities 

“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.”

– Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

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

– Collin Clifford, Legal & Compliance Manager at Superhuman 

“The software access automations were a huge win for us. They were super easy to set up and we now have more than 30 applications with automated provisioning running 24/7.”

– Tom Grinberg, IT Manager at Trust & Will 

3 Examples of How Risottos Intelligently Resolves Knowledge-Based Questions 

In addition to streamlining software access, Risotto also excels at auto-solving repetitive knowledge-based questions. 

Example 1: Intelligent Triage

Our AI agent can perform intelligent triage to understand the appropriate context of the employee query.

In the example above:

• 🧑‍💼 An employee reports a camera issue in a conference room.
• 🤖 Risotto performs intelligent tier-1 triage & information collection, and asks which conference room it is. 
• 🧑‍💼 The employee provides the conference room information.
• 🤖 Risotto responds with step-by-step troubleshooting instructions tailored to that room’s known issues.
• 🧑‍💼 The employee confirms the fix worked.

Example 2: Multi-Step Troubleshooting

When employees respond with a curveball, Risotto doesn’t get confused or immediately escalate to an agent like other chatbots might. Instead, it performs multi-step troubleshooting, responding intelligently to new information.

In the example above:

• 🧑‍💼Tyler Morris asks, “How can I get an employee badge?”
• 🤖Risotto responds with the Employee Badge Process
• 🧑‍💼Tyler clarifies, “I just need a temporary one, I left mine at home.”
• 🤖Risotto automatically pivots, offering the relevant information: “If you forget your employee badge, visit the reception desk to obtain a temporary badge.”

Example 3: Multi-Modal Capabilities

Risotto can also understand and respond to multi-modal input such as images and screenshots.

In the above example, taken from the Trust & Will case study:

• 🧑‍💼 Jessica posts in the IT-support channel: “I’m having trouble logging into my account, see this screenshot.”
• 🤖 Risotto analyzes the screenshot and identifies the exact error: username/password logins are no longer allowed.
• 🤖 Risotto replies with the correct fix: log in through Single Sign-On (SSO) in Okta.
• 🧑‍💼 Jessica tries it and confirms that the solution worked.

Customer Quotes Demonstrating Risotto’s Ability to Auto-Solve Knowledge Questions 

“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 

Additional Advantages of Risotto, Backed by Customer Quotes

In addition to the benefits we covered above, Risotto offers several other noteworthy advantages. Below, we’ll take a look at these benefits, with customer quotes supporting each one.

Fast Time-To-Value with Prebuilt Workflows and Seamless Onboarding

Unlike general-purpose automation tools that aim to serve every use case, Risotto is specifically purpose-built to automate 20-60% of tier-1 IT tickets. 

Prebuilt workflows mean you're up and running in hours, not weeks or months. We also offer optional onboarding guided by former IT practitioners, as we detail in our founding story.  

As some 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

“​​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

“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

“The speed and simplicity of Risotto’s setup was a great sign that we had made a good decision.”

– Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise

"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

Seamless Integration with Your Existing Tech Stack

Employees get support right where they work. Risotto integrates with Slack, Gmail, Teams, and other tools in your stack, eliminating workflow disruption and driving easy adoption.

As some of our customers shared: 

“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

Bi-Directional Sync with Ticketing Systems like Jira, Freshservice, Zendesk & More

Risotto works as a standalone ticketing system or integrates with your existing platforms — Jira, Freshservice, Zendesk, and others. Risotto manages the complete ticket lifecycle with seamless, bi-directional sync, including: 

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

As one of our customers 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.”

– Tom Grinberg, IT Manager at Trust & Will

Continuous Learning From Past Tickets and Slack Conversations

With Risotto, you never have to answer the same question twice. Our AI agent automatically learns from past ticket resolutions and Slack conversations in approved channels, reducing KB creation and upkeep. 

As some of our customers shared: 

“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 

Multi-Department Capabilities

While Risotto was initially built for IT, other departments such as HR, Sales, and Legal often adopt it to auto-solve their own repetitive questions. You can add unlimited departments at no extra cost, and intelligent routing ensures tickets reach the right team every time.

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 

Interested in Learning More About Risotto?

Risotto is purpose-built to help IT teams (and other departments) automatically resolve tier-1 tickets, and it’s deployable out of the box in just hours, not weeks or months. 

We encourage you to:

• Book a demo
• Read our origin story 
• Explore our customer success stories
  
  • Fundrise: Automated nearly 60% of IT support tickets
  • Superhuman: Automated nearly 20% of IT support tickets
  • Ironclad: Automated nearly 90% of access-related IT requests
  • ThoughtSpot: Automated nearly 48% of IT support tickets
  • Trust & Will: Automated nearly 35% 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

2. Ansible

Ansible is an IT automation software that offers the following use cases:

• AI automation
• Virtual infrastructure management
• Network automation
• Cloud automation
• Operating systems automation
• Application delivery
• Automated Policy as Code
• Provisioning
• Edge automation
• Security automation
• Configuration management
• DevOps
• Orchestration

Overall, it’s a solid, scalable tool to optimize and streamline repetitive tasks. 

3. Terraform

Terraform is an IT automation tool. Some of its use cases include:

• Manage any infrastructure
• Track your infrastructure
• Automate changes
• Standardize configurations 
• Collaborate

Overall, it offers robust automation features to help meet a variety of business needs.

4. ServiceNow

ServiceNow is an IT automation platform. 

Some of their key products and capabilities include:

• AI Agents & AI Bots
• IT Service Management
• ServiceNow AI Control Tower
• IT Operations Management
• Customer Service Management
• Strategic Portfolio Management
• IT Asset Management
• Governance, Risk, and Compliance
• Security Operations
• Field Service Management
• HR Service Delivery
• Employee Center

To learn more about how Risotto compares to ServiceNow, see our article on the 13 Best ServiceNow Alternatives & Competitors.

5. Moveworks

Moveworks is an IT automation software.

Some of its key products and capabilities include:

• AI Assistant
• Enterprise Search
• Productivity Boost
• Agent Studio
• Knowledge Studio
• Employee Experience Insights

To learn more about how Risotto compares to Moveworks, read our article on the best Moveworks competitors & alternatives.

6. ActiveBatch

ActiveBatch is a solid IT automation provider.

Some of its key features and capabilities include:

• Job Step Library
• Reporting and Monitoring
• Event-Driven Job Scheduling
• Security, Auditing, and Governance
• Views and Interfaces
• Cloud Provisioning
• SLA Management
• Architecture and High Availability

Overall, it’s a solid end-to-end option for scripting IT processes.

7. Dynatrace

Dynatrace is an IT automation tool.

The solution covers areas such as:

• Infrastructure Observability
• Application Observability
• AI Observability
• Digital Experience
• Log Analytics
• Application Security
• Threat Observability
• Software Delivery
• Business Observability

Overall, it’s a solid AI-powered business process automation solution for reducing IT’s workload and minimizing bottlenecks.

8. RunDeck

RunDeck by PagerDuty is an IT automation platform.

Some of its key capabilities and features include:

• Improve operational quality
• Automate task and job scheduling
• Technology and tool integrations
• Job activity log for auditing

Overall, it’s one of the user-friendly software solutions to help streamline workflows.

9. Zapier

Zapier is an AI automation software.

Its key capabilities and features include:

• App integrations
• AI automation
• Enterprise-grade security

Some of the use cases they cover include:

• Lead management
• Sales pipeline
• Marketing campaigns
• Customer support
• Data management
• Project management
• Tickets and incidents

Overall, it offers solid integration capabilities and a smooth user experience.

10. Zluri

Zluri is an IT automation solution.

Some of the use cases they offer include:

• Identity & Application Visibility
• Uncover Shadow IT
• Monitor AI Apps
• Identity Lifecycle Management
• Access Requests
• Access Reviews

Overall, it’s a solid option for automating time-consuming processes in real-time. They also offer useful APIs.

Get Started with Risotto

Risotto helps IT teams automatically resolve 20-60% of tier-1 tickets, integrating seamlessly with your existing tech stack.

To learn more, we invite you to book a demo or explore customer success stories.