The payoff has been dramatic. According to Lyteson, IBM’s AskIT system now resolves 82% of support requests without human intervention, freeing IT staff to focus on complex issues and allowing IBM to close 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 next phase of AI
Murali Swaminathan, CTO of IT services firm Freshworks, believes this new age of agentic AI must 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 company’s Freddy AI platform, launched in 2018, has evolved from chat support into a system that automates end-to-end workflows. In HR, for instance, an employee can request vacation time, and the agent determines which HR system to query, checks policy and balance, and executes the request. “It’s about reasoning and action, not just retrieval,” he said, adding that customers such as UK-based Frasers Group are already deflecting about a quarter of support cases using these agentic workflows.
