IT teams often turn to service desk automation tools because they're drowning in repetitive tier-1 tickets, agents are constantly pulled away from higher-value work, and manual processes can't keep up as employee headcount grows while IT teams stay the same size.

In this article, we'll start by discussing our own tool, Risotto, which helps IT teams auto-solve 20-60% of tier-1 tickets. It works within the tools your employees already use (e.g., Slack, Teams, email), adds AI-powered automation on top of your existing ticketing system, and deploys in hours, not weeks or months.

We'll also cover tools that address other service desk automation needs, so you can make a more informed decision. With the right automation in place, you can streamline most service desk workflows.
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1. Risotto

Risotto is our AI-powered service desk automation tool that auto-solves (not just deflects) tier-1 IT tickets, including access requests, knowledge-based questions, and password resets. See how companies have used Risotto to support their service desk automation needs:

• 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 

We built Risotto based on our co-founder Alex’s experience leading IT engineering at Gusto and Dropbox, as we explore in our origin story. Having seen firsthand the challenges IT teams face at large, fast-growing companies, we designed Risotto specifically to solve them.

Risotto works entirely within your existing workflows, including communication tools like Slack, MS Teams, and email, bringing scattered support threads under one roof.

Risotto seamlessly integrates with existing ticketing systems like Jira, Freshservice, and Zendesk, adding AI-powered tier-1 ticket automation on top. It manages the entire ticket lifecycle, including ticket creation, titling, routing, categorization, tagging, triage, and more.

Below is an example of Risotto auto-solving a time-based access request directly in Slack: 

Risotto walks the employee through the request conversationally — just like an IT agent would — then automatically provisions and deprovisions access based on your preconfigured rules and approval workflows. (We'll share additional IGA automation examples later, including streamlining approval-based and instant self-service access requests.)

Below is just one example of Risotto auto-solving a knowledge question:

In this example, Risotto reads and interprets a screenshot the employee uploads, identifies the error, and walks through a multi-step troubleshooting conversation until the issue is fully resolved — not just deflected. This ability to actually solve problems, not just suggest articles, is what sets Risotto apart from other AI IT help desk tools.

Risotto can be deployed in hours, not weeks or months. Because we're focused on resolving tier-1 tickets within your existing tools, we offer prebuilt workflows that get you up and running quickly — unlike generalist platforms that require extensive configuration before you see results.

This was a key benefit Phillip Rickett, VP of IT at Fundrise, noted in our case study. They had switched to Risotto from a legacy enterprise platform: 

Up next, we’ll dive deeper into the key benefits of Risotto, backed by customer testimonials:

1. Enterprise-grade IGA automation capabilities, helping you save time, improve security, and reduce cloud costs.
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2. Effective knowledge-based question handling, including intelligent triage, multi-step troubleshooting, and understanding multi-modal inputs (such as screenshots). Our AI agent doesn’t just deflect tickets — it auto-solves a large portion of them. 
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3. Continuous learning from prior ticket resolutions and Slack updates, so you never answer the same question twice and spend less time maintaining your knowledge base.
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4. Seamless integration with your current tech stack, including communication channels (e.g., Slack, MS Teams, email), ticketing systems (e.g., Jira, Freshservice, Zendesk), existing IDPs (e.g., Okta groups, Google Groups), ServiceNow, and a plethora of other providers. 
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5. Fast setup and time-to-value, with onboarding guided by former IT practitioners who’ve led IT engineering at large enterprise companies.
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6. Multi-department capabilities at no extra charge, with intelligent ticket routing to the correct person and department.

Benefit #1: Enterprise-Grade IGA Automation Capabilities

In a nutshell, here’s how Risotto automates access requests:

• Employees request software access in plain English through tools they already use (e.g., Slack, Teams, email).
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• Risotto handles provisioning and de-provisioning via a friendly, conversational chat format — asking for justification, duration (for just-in-time access), and other key details as needed.
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• Risotto routes approval requests to the appropriate managers with full ticket context, so they can approve in one click. (This is all streamlined via Slack or existing corporate chat channels.) 
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• Risotto maintains detailed audit records end-to-end, ensuring security and compliance.
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• Our intuitive self-serve dashboard lets you onboard apps in minutes, set up RBAC rules, configure multi-step approvals, and more.

Setup takes hours, not weeks or months. You get enterprise-grade IGA automation without the complexity and implementation burden of legacy enterprise systems. 

Next, let’s take a look at 3 examples of how Risotto automates time-based, approval-based, and self-service access requests, as well as how you can add and configure new applications through our flexible self-service dashboard.
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Time-Based Access

In the example above:

• Logan asks, “Hey IT, can you give my new team member @Michael Baker access to Stripe?”
• ‍Risotto responds: “What level of access does he need?”
• ‍‍Logan replies: “View only.”
• Risotto clarifies duration: “For how long? (1 hour to 90 days)”
• Logan answers: “90 days he’ll be on this project for a while.”
• Upon a manager’s approval, Risotto automatically provisions access and de-provisions it once the time expires. 

As you can see, every access request requires justification and is logged for audit purposes. 

Risotto can also send proactive reminders before access expires, allowing employees to extend if needed (as shown above).

Approval-Based Access

In the example above:

• Andrew asks: “Can I get a seat for Amplitude?”
• Risotto requests context and a brief explanation.
• Andrew replies:  “I need to create reports for Sales.”  
• Upon approval from the relevant manager(s), Risotto automatically completes the task: “The request to grant you access to Amplitude was approved. I’ve granted you access.”

Self-Service Access

For low-risk applications, you can configure Risotto to grant access automatically, without necessarily requiring a manager's approval.

In the above example: 

• Maya asks IT: “Kai Turner and I need Figma access.”‍
• Risotto asks for justification.
• Kai replies: “We need to view the roadmap.” Maya adds: “Same here!”
• ‍Based on your pre-configured conditional rules, Risotto may automatically provision access. 

Notably, Maya requested access for two people in a single message, and Risotto understood exactly what she meant. No rigid forms or dropdowns — just natural conversation. That's how IT support should work. 
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Adding and Managing New Applications

Risotto integrates with your existing IDPs (Okta, Google Workspace, and others). You can import your applications and rules in minutes:

Once imported, you can easily manage all applications from a centralized dashboard: 

Risotto makes it easy to set up dynamic rules and multi-step approval workflows — far more intuitive than legacy IGA tools. But don't mistake simplicity for lack of power: underneath is enterprise-grade identity governance built for complex needs.
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Customer Quotes Demonstrating Risotto’s IGA 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

“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 

"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 

"Our control for SOC 2 is that access to privileged systems is approved by a manager… Risotto is able to automate the approval process and ticket tracking portion which is exactly what we needed.”

– Vergil Smith, IT Manager at Vidyard

"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

“Before Risotto compliance reports could take days to figure out but now I can pull everything needed in seconds.”

– Jason Huey, Senior IT Systems Administrator at ThoughtSpot

Benefit #2: Effective Knowledge-Based Question Handling

In addition to software access requests, Risotto can also auto-solve knowledge-based questions. 

Unlike legacy AI IT support tools that simply link to knowledge articles or escalate immediately, Risotto fully resolves a large portion of tickets. It conducts triage, walks employees through multi-step troubleshooting, analyzes screenshots and other multimodal inputs, and draws on both your knowledge base and past ticket resolutions to provide more accurate answers.

When escalation is needed, Risotto hands off tickets to IT agents via Slack with full context and troubleshooting history, so agents can jump in without repeating work or hunting for information.

Next, let’s take a look at 3 examples of how Risotto intelligently auto-solves knowledge questions:

Intelligent Triage

In the example above:

• Andrew asks for help: “Hey I’m in a conference room and the camera isn’t working can you help?”‍
• Risotto begins troubleshooting: “What conference room are you in? This will help me troubleshoot the camera issue for you.”‍
• Andrew replies: “Conference room B.”‍
• Risotto provides step-by-step instructions tailored to the room’s known issues.
• Andrew confirms: “That worked thanks!”

Just like that, the issue is fully resolved without IT involvement. Your agents get time back for higher-value work, and you can support a growing workforce without adding IT headcount.

Handling Curveball Questions

In this example:

• Tyler Morris messages Risotto asking, “How can I get an employee badge?”‍
• Risotto responds with the typical employee badge process.
• Tyler clarifies, “I actually just need a temporary one, I left mine at home.”‍
• Risotto intelligently adapts to the new context and responds: "If you forgot your badge, visit the reception desk for a temporary one."

Multi-Modal Capabilities

In the above example, taken from the Trust & Will case study, Risotto instantly understands and analyzes a screenshot the employee uploads, and fully resolves the issue end-to-end: 

• An employee uploads a screenshot with minimal support context: “Hey I’m having trouble logging into my account, see this screenshot.”
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• Risotto is able to understand the screenshot and replies: “We no longer allow username/password logins. Can you try it through Single Sign-On (SSO) in your Okta dashboard?"
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• ‍‍Jessica confirms success: “Cool! That worked!”

Customer Quotes Supporting Risotto’s Knowledge-Based Question Resolution Capabilities

“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 

Benefit #3: Continuous Learning From Prior Ticket Resolutions and Slack Updates

With Risotto, you never have to answer the same question twice. 

Our AI agent continuously learns from past ticket resolutions and Slack conversations (in approved channels), reducing the burden of creating and maintaining the knowledge base.

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

• Jessica asks: “Hey when’s our next audit for SOC 2?”‍
• Risotto doesn't just pull from your KB, which might be outdated — it also draws on information it learned from Slack: “The next SOC 2 audit will start in July and the observation period should last three months.”

This ensures more accurate, up-to-date answers. 

Customer Quotes Supporting Risotto’s Auto-Learning Capabilities 

“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

Benefit #4: Seamless Integration With Your Current Tech Stack

Risotto lives directly in Slack or Microsoft Teams — where your employees already work. No new portals to learn, no extra logins, no friction. Just faster answers in the tools they're already using every day.

It integrates via bi-directional sync with existing ticketing systems (e.g., Jira, Freshservice, Zendesk), and manages the complete ticket lifecycle, including: 

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

Customer Quotes Supporting Risotto’s Integration Capabilities 

"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 

“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 

Benefit #5: Fast Setup and Time-to-Value

Unlike general-purpose legacy tools that try to cover every use case, Risotto is purpose-built to automate tier-1 IT tickets. 

Our prebuilt workflows enable deployment in mere hours, not weeks or months. We also offer optional hands-on onboarding guided by our founding team of former IT practitioners. 

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Customer Quotes Supporting Risotto’s Fast Setup and Time-to-Value

"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

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Benefit #6: Multi-Department Capabilities 

Risotto makes it easy to expand beyond IT to other departments that also want to reduce their ticket volumes and achieve faster response times: 

• Unlimited departments under one license — add HR, Finance, Legal, or any other team at no extra cost. 
• Automatic ticket routing to the right person and department.
• An intuitive built-in ticketing system that non-technical teams can use from day one.
• Department-level customization for workflows, permissions, knowledge bases, and more. 

Customer Quotes Supporting Risotto’s Multi-Department Capabilities 

"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 autosolves 20–60% of tier-1 tickets and sets up in hours, not weeks or months. 

We built it because, while working at companies like Gusto and Dropbox, we wished a tool like this existed — one that could handle high volumes of repetitive tickets with sophisticated automation, without the complexity of traditional enterprise systems.

To learn more, we invite you to:

• Schedule a demo call
• Read our origin story
• Explore the following 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. ServiceNow

ServiceNow is an enterprise platform that can be used for service desk automation.  

Some of its capabilities include: 

• AI Agents: Take action with autonomous AI agents that work for you.
• IT Service Management: Transform service management for productivity and ROI.
• Customer Service Management: Empower self-service, boost agent productivity, and speed up resolution.
• HR Service Delivery: Give employees instant answers, guidance, and fast issue resolution.
• Employee Center: Provide employees with a unified portal to access services, communications, apps, and tasks.

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

3. Freshservice 

Freshservice is an AI-powered ITSM platform that can be used for service desk automation. It’s part of the Freshworks platform, which includes other products such as Freshdesk (for customer service use cases). 

Some of its capabilities include: 

• Workflow automation: Automate tasks with no-code workflows, orchestration, and Machine Learning to streamline approvals, support requests, and incident resolution.
• Freddy AI: Scale up and accelerate service delivery with a ready-to-use, enterprise-grade AI chatbot that boosts agent productivity, improves employee satisfaction, and unlocks insights for decision-makers.
• Incident management: Auto-route incidents, get AI assistance, and generate incident reports in seconds. Resolve tickets faster and improve IT efficiency and resiliency.
• SLA management: Create custom service level agreement (SLA) policies, auto-escalate priority tickets, and track performance to stay compliant and avoid service delays.
• Support portal: A self-service portal to centralize requests.

Overall, it’s a solid tool for creating automated workflows and getting a better understanding of key metrics. 

Note: To learn more about how Risotto compares to Freshworks, see our article on the 7 Top Freshservice Alternatives.

4. Zendesk

Zendesk is an AI-powered service desk solution with powerful automation capabilities. It's especially popular with customer support teams, though many IT teams use it as well.

Some of its capabilities include: 

• AI agents: Resolve customer and employee conversations across multiple channels.
• Copilot: Offers real-time suggestions and proactive assistance to agents as they’re solving customer queries.
• Ticketing: Brings email, messaging, phone, social, and more into a single place.
• Messaging and live chat: Gives support through a widget on your website or on your mobile app, helping ensure higher customer satisfaction rates. 
• Help center: A knowledge base that helps build, connect, and surface knowledge across agents, AI, and self-service.

Note: To learn more about how Risotto compares to Zendesk, see our article on the 20 Best Zendesk Alternatives. 

5. Jira Service Management 

Jira Service Management is a powerful platform that can be used for service desk automation.

Some of JSM’s capabilities include:

• Virtual Service Agents: Utilize intent flows or AI answers to help resolve tickets faster and reduce repetitive tasks. 
• Knowledge Management: Using generative AI, JSM surfaces relevant articles and suggestions, helps draft documentations, and more
• Agent & Admin Productivity: Organize your ticket queue and prioritize the most relevant tasks via AI triage, customer sentiment analysis, and Rovo Agent’s Service Triage Assistant. 
• AI Summaries: AI automatically analyzes and summarizes past ticket history. 
• AI Drafting & Editing: Utilize AI to help draft better responses or edit existing wording. 
• AIOps Capabilities, including AI incident creation, AI incident summary and timeline in Slack, AI suggestions panel, AI PIR generation, etc.

To learn more about how Risotto compares to Jira Service Management, see our article on the 7 Best Jira Service Management Competitors.

6. Moveworks

Moveworks is an agentic AI platform that can be used for service desk automation. 

Some of its capabilities include: 

• AI Assistant: Works across your apps for fast, accurate, and context-aware search with end-to-end task automation.
• Agent Studio: An intelligent platform to power action across every business process for every team, from HR, Sales, Finance, and beyond.
• Service Management: An agentic AI solution for enterprise support automation.
• Enterprise Search: AI-powered, context-aware search.
• Knowledge Studio: Generate knowledge articles with your data.
• Productivity Boost: Agentic AI to synthesize information, create content, and save time.
• Quick GPT: Find answers, generate content, and troubleshoot issues by natively leveraging GPT's vast knowledge base.
• Brief Me: AI Summarizer: Use AI to unlock insights from your documents.

To learn more about how Risotto compares to Moveworks, read our article on the 8 best Moveworks alternatives. 

7. ManageEngine

ManageEngine offers AI-powered IT management solutions.

Some of its capabilities include:

• Identity governance and administration: Orchestrate user identity management and access controls for Zero Trust
• Privileged access management: Control and secure privileged access to critical enterprise systems
• Enterprise and IT service management: Deliver a consistent employee experience across business functions
• Customer service management: Build a one-stop portal for customers with efficient account management

8. Resolve

‍Resolve is an agentic IT automation & orchestration platform.

Some of its capabilities include: 

• Automation: Build workflows your way. Get started with their AI agents to build automations or import your existing scripts to create reusable building blocks.
• Orchestration: Coordinate tasks across IT and network operations to automate mission-critical processes from start to finish.
• Integrations & APIs: Seamlessly connect your tools and applications with a vast library of integrations, making workflow automation effortless.
• Automation Exchange: Explore their library of automations designed to plug directly into your IT ecosystem.

9. InvGate

InvGate is an AI-powered IT management platform.

Some of its service desk automation capabilities include:

• AI-Improved Responses: Draft better responses in less time. 
• Knowledge Article Summaries: Agents can automatically surface & summarize knowledge articles, and send those summaries to customers. 
• Knowledge Article Generation: Turn closed tickets into KB articles in just a few clicks and optimize efficiency. 

10. SolarWinds

‍SolarWinds provides AI-powered features and insights for IT teams. 

Some of its capabilities include:

• Service Management: All the tools you need for seamless ticket resolution, unified in one platform.
• AI & Automation: Enhance employee experiences and save agent time with AI-driven service management.
• Enterprise Service Management: Empower every department to streamline services, enhance workflows, and track requests with ease.

Interested in Learning More About Risotto? 

Risotto auto-solves 20-60% of tier-1 tickets via a conversational, user-friendly format, directly within your corporate chat channels.

We are enterprise-ready with one license that covers IT, HR, Finance, Legal, Sales Ops, and other departments that deal with repetitive tickets.

To learn more about our automated service desk solution, we invite you to:

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