Use Cases of Generative AI and ChatGPT for IT

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is a new AI-based chat interface that provides human-like responses to queries. It was launched on November 30, 2022, swiftly gaining popularity.

By December, it had amassed over one million users, and by January, it had crossed the 100 million user mark. Despite its novelty and the occasional hiccup, it’s being widely used for a variety of purposes, including Generative AI and ChatGPT for IT service desk, proving itself to be an invaluable tool.

How it works is simple. Users provide a prompt (ranging from a simple question to a detailed prompt with nuanced parameters) and the system will return context-specific responses in full sentences and paragraphs that read as if it is human-generated content.

Originally designed to save agents time on support teams, ChatGPT has the potential to be a powerful assistant for help desk agents in the IT sector, and that is great news for IT support. This tool can be a huge asset in your effort to automate your IT help desk.

Large Language Models (LLMs), Training Data and ChatGPT?

AI chatbots aren’t new. Almost everyone has interacted with one online at some point through a website or app. However, standard chatbots tend to provide robotic responses to user queries that don’t always hit the target.

ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence model and natural language processing tool that’s used for generating content and is capable of having human-like conversations based on user input. As a trained machine learning and natural language processing model, ChatGPT is capable of human-like text dialogue, can admit mistakes, ask follow-up questions, and refuse to provide answers to inappropriate prompts.

The creative minds behind ChatGPT are from OpenAI, the same Microsoft-backed company that made DALL-E-2, the AI image generation tool that you may have seen all over Twitter.

Because of the large language model and its versatility, ChatGPT is being used to create content for websites dialog applications, email responses, essays, jokes, poetry, and even code. While there are several AI chatbots on the market, ChatGPT seems to be the preferred choice.

Using chatGPT and Generative AI for IT Support

Why does IT support need an AI chatbot?

The bottom line is that AI chatbots improve the auto-resolution of support requests, which reduces the cost of running an internal IT help desk. Basically, ChatGPT is an AI-powered tool that will help you empower your own IT help desk chatbot.

Six use case examples for ChatGPT in IT support

1. Self-service knowledge base articles

When you have an IT help desk, you want to reduce your agents’ workload as much as possible with ticket deflection. The fundamental component of this effort is your knowledge base. The more helpful articles you have, the more likely people are to find their solutions without needing help from a live agent. This keeps your agents free to handle more pressing issues.

A strong knowledge management solution will provide answers to frequently asked questions and offer a detailed troubleshooting guide for the most common user needs. However, you have to write your knowledge base articles, which can take quite a bit of time. With Generative AI, you can either keep creating content outlines or draft knowledge base entries quickly and then edit the content to be relevant to your company.

ChatGPT is excellent support for your internal help desk’s AI-powered chatbot. When you use ChatGPT to generate your content, your chatbot will have far more self-help articles to provide as options when users ask for help. Users will get what they need, and most of the time, this won’t require support from a live agent causing service delivery delays.

2. Call scripts

Does your company offer phone-based IT support for employees? If so, your agents will benefit from using call scripts. A call script helps agents stay on track and cover all the necessary bases when handling an IT support request. It also achieves consistency in the way they handle issues.

ChatGPT can be prompted to generate basic call scripts that you can customize to meet your needs. For example, you can ask the system to “create a call script for an IT support agent” and get the following response:

  • IT Support Agent: Thank you for calling the IT help desk. My name is [Agent Name]. How may I help you today?
  • Caller: Hi, I’m having trouble with my computer.
  • IT Support Agent: I understand. Can you please tell me what the problem is?
  • Caller: My computer is frozen.
  • IT Support Agent: Okay, I can help you with that. First, let’s try restarting your computer. To do that, hold down the power button for 10 seconds.
  • Caller: Okay, I did that.
  • IT Support Agent: Great. Is your computer still frozen?
  • Caller: No, it’s working now.
  • If these steps resolve the issue:
  • IT Support Agent: I’m glad to hear that. If you have any other problems, please don’t hesitate to call us back.

Otherwise:

  • IT Support Agent: I’m sorry, it seems that the solution didn’t work. Can you please tell me what happened when you restarted your computer? I’ll help you troubleshoot the issue to resolution.

Closing:

  • IT Support Agent: Thank you for contacting support at Company X. If you have any further issues, please submit another request through the help desk. Have a great day!
  • Caller: Thank you for your help.
  • IT Support Agent: You’re welcome.
IT support chat with Generative AI

3. Disaster recovery plan

You never know when your IT infrastructure might go offline, or worse, get hit by a cyberattack. Hopefully, you already have a well-documented outage communication and disaster recovery plan. If not, you can create one with a Generative AI platform.

How will your IT support staff handle an IT disaster or similar disruptive events? You’ll need to create a plan for each type of known disaster, like a power outage, network attack, and more. Will you conduct disaster recovery drills to get IT staff familiar with recovery procedures? How will backups be handled? Do you have an inventory of your IT assets? If all this is new to you, creating a disruptive event and disaster recovery plan outline with ChatGPT will get you started.

Although you can get a good outline from an AI tool, it’s critical that you consult with an IT security professional to ensure you have the right software and security policies in place. Simply outlining your policy isn’t enough to protect your company, although it is an important component.

4. Company support policies

It’s important for your IT help desk team to follow company policy, but you might not have a policy model written out. These language models take time to create, and if this task has slipped by, or you want to create one with less effort, ChatGPT can help.

Create a prompt asking ChatGPT to “create an IT support policy model,” and you’ll get some samples that will cover all the important sections. From there, you can edit the content to reflect your specific needs and requirements. However, most of the hard work of outlining everything will already be done.

5. Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

ChatGPT is an excellent tool for creating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for your IT help desk team. SOP documents help team members understand exactly what they need to do, how tasks need to be performed, and when. This documentation makes it easier for anyone to take over a position when someone takes time off work and when onboarding new employees.

For an IT help desk team, this is critical. You might be able to hire an experienced professional to cover for someone temporarily, but they won’t know the specifics of your company, they won’t be familiar with your self-help resources off the bat, and it will still take time for them to get into the flow.

6. Fast email replies

Writing email responses is one of the most repetitive tasks your help desk agents perform on a regular basis. They can benefit from using ChatGPT to generate human-like responses, either on the spot or to create templates suitable for customizing according to common issues. For instance, if they get a lot of support requests for a printer that won’t connect to the network, they can create a standard email response using Generative AI and customize the details for your company.

If agents struggle to find the right words even for a simple email, ChatGPT will generate an email response that sounds clear and professional. You can also use ChatGPT to write automated system-wide responses that acknowledge a user’s request has been received.

You can also use ChatGPT to generate different versions of auto-response content to use throughout your company.

For example, instead of having everyone write their autoresponders for redirecting support requests, you can create one using ChatGPT and standardize the response to match your company’s brand while offering alternative solutions for help.

This standardization not only maintains brand consistency but also aims to reduce resolution time. So, if anyone emails your tech team directly instead of going through your helpdesk first, they’ll receive a uniform, professional response that redirects them efficiently to your ticketing system.

Take full advantage of AI-powered IT support with Aisera

If you’re ready to reduce the cost of internal tech support while increasing the effectiveness of that support, you need an AI help desk. Contact us today and request a free AI demo today!

Aisera’s AI-powereIT service desk will help you streamline IT support, employee onboarding, collaboration, training data, and communication.

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