How automation is impacting the help desk

Sometimes the help desk could use a little help.

The help desk has gotten a boost from AI lately, with IT service management tools now automating basic tasks like ticket classification, password resets and application access, documentation, and predictive analytics.

So, what happens to a help desk pro who has a lot more free time thanks to AI taking a whole tier of tasks off their to-do list? There’s an opportunity for new skills and projects, for starters.

The impact of AI at the help desk. A November 2025 survey from market-intelligence firm Gartner found that 55% of more than 300 customer service and support leaders reported “stable staffing” levels due to handling higher customer volume after implementing AI (1 out of 5, however, claimed having “been able to reduce agent headcount as a result of their AI initiatives”).

Help desks typically have three tiers:

• Tier 1. A front line of help desk pros who don’t require high levels of technical expertise. Tasks include problems with email, access, file permissions, wi-fi connectivity, and laptop performance.
• Tier 2. This group handles situations requiring deeper technical knowledge like server performance, Active Directory, or backup and recovery.
• Tier 3. Your all-around experts. They handle architecture-level problems, for tough tasks from security incident response to application code debugging.

Matt Peters, CEO of IT automation platform Fixify, said he is seeing a “compression on tier 1” thanks to AI, which leads to smaller teams working on complex tickets or tier-1 individuals taking on skill-building “projects.” He said he has seen one customer send a help desk pro to achieve SANS cybersecurity training; another has taken on a cloud-migration project in a legacy data center.

An IT team shows its value, according to Peters, when a help desk deploys new, better tech (and perhaps even eliminates “friction”). Clearing out Tier 1 tasks with the help of AI, he argues, frees up the IT pro to deliver those.

“When you think about ROI or value from an IT department, you need to deliver a good, high-quality help desk, and you need to make sure the lights stay on. That’s table stakes. You can’t screw that up,” he said. “But you’re not going to get a lot of credit for that. You need to then [say], ‘We’re delivering all these projects and rolling out new software and making everybody’s laptops run faster.’

Can automation make a bad help desk worse? A clearing out of Tier 1 tasks is helpful…as long as the automation is reliable. A newly automated help desk, for example, may connect to a configuration management database. But what happens if that “CMDB” is not updated properly or completely?

“You can end up in a situation where you’re just doing the wrong thing faster,” Craig Mackereth, EVP of global service delivery at enterprise software support provider Rimini Street, said.

Noel Temena, founder of IT training platform Deductive Lab, has seen help desk pros use AI tools to diagnose and fix an issue, and then only document the fix; they skip documenting how they discovered the problem and what the AI did.

“That’s human nature, because most likely, the help desk needs to go to another issue,” Temena said, recommending that pros copy and paste as much of the LLM conversation into a ticket as possible, to improve an overall knowledge base for the company. With a lack of documentation, you’re not getting early identification of a larger problem—Mackereth added, suggesting that all information be stored in an IT service management (ITSM) tool as a system of record.

And a new ticket is emerging: “The automation broke” or “The automation couldn’t figure it out,” according to Peters. In that context, a pro who understands the path of an automated action and all the IT infrastructure components it hits along the way will be especially valuable at the help desk. Mackereth recommends pros understand and get certified in their ITSM tools, as well as build customer-facing skills.

For Peters, a critical help desk skill is no longer, How fast can I do a repetitive action?

“The value on that from a human perspective has gone down, and it’s much more like, ‘Can I do systems thinking?’”