The payoff has been dramatic. In line with Lyteson, IBM’s AskIT system now resolves 82% of support requests without human intervention, freeing IT staff to give attention to complex issues and allowing IBM to shut its IT Service Desk phone lines. “We’re now focused on trust and collaboration — humans working confidently alongside multiple agents,” he said.
Responsible intelligence and the subsequent phase of AI
Murali Swaminathan, CTO of IT services firm Freshworks, believes this recent age of agentic AI should be guided by responsibility as much as innovation. He describes AI’s evolution in three stages: traditional chatbots, which were scripted and brittle; agent-assist systems, which indexed knowledge for humans; and now agentic AI, which understands context and acts on it. “It’s like moving from guided driving to full self-driving,” he said.
The corporate’s Freddy AI platform, launched in 2018, has evolved from chat support right into a system that automates end-to-end workflows. In HR, as an example, an worker can request vacation time, and the agent determines which HR system to question, checks policy and balance, and executes the request. “It’s about reasoning and motion, not only retrieval,” he said, adding that customers corresponding to UK-based Frasers Group are already deflecting a few quarter of support cases using these agentic workflows.