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Summary – Often seen as a cost center limited to passwords and VPNs, IT support is a strategic bottleneck that each year drains hundreds of hours from technical and business teams, hampering productivity, employee satisfaction, and innovation capacity. A Level 0 AI agent, integrated with your collaboration tools and knowledge base, automatically diagnoses and resolves 40–60% of simple incidents, cuts errors, and frees up your IT department for high-impact projects (cloud, cybersecurity, bespoke tools).
Solution: deploy a modular AI agent—cloud, on-premise, or hybrid—to achieve ROI in under six months and set the stage for automating other internal functions.
In many Swiss companies, IT support is seen as a harmless cost center, limited to password resets and VPN issues. In reality, every internal request is a strategic bottleneck: hundreds of hours wasted each year on basic tasks drag down business teams’ productivity and the IT department’s capacity for innovation.
Although automating these processes is now technically feasible, many organizations still overlook this performance lever. This article explains why deploying an AI agent for IT support is the first step toward a comprehensive transformation of all internal functions.
The IT Support Bottleneck
IT support is not just a cost center: it’s an invisible brake on overall performance. Every ticket handled directly impacts the entire organization’s innovation capacity.
Recurring Requests and Lost Focus
Password reset requests, access checks, and minor Office or VPN incidents repeat endlessly. Each intervention ties up qualified technicians who could otherwise focus their expertise on high-value projects like cloud migrations or strengthening cybersecurity.
From a business standpoint, every minute of waiting translates into growing frustration, workflow interruptions, and ultimately slower delivery of value to end customers. Internal satisfaction metrics and team morale both suffer as a result.
Underestimated Hourly Consumption
In a mid-sized industrial company, we observed over 1,200 tickets opened in six months solely for access rights issues and standard software installations. These interventions amounted to the equivalent of twelve person-weeks of work, time that could have been devoted to innovation initiatives and proactive maintenance.
And this is not an isolated case. IT teams frequently spend more than half their time on low-value tasks due to a lack of automated tools to handle these flows.
The AI Agent as Level-0 Super Technician
An AI agent connected to your internal tools behaves like a first-level technician, able to diagnose and resolve the majority of simple requests automatically. It’s not just a chatbot, but an intelligent assistant integrated with your information system.
Contextual Understanding and Knowledge Base
The AI agent leverages an advanced language model to interpret requests within their business context (AI agents). It analyzes not only keywords but the user’s real intent, whether it involves access issues or software installation.
It then references your internal knowledge base—SharePoint documents, Confluence pages, or ITSM notes—to extract the appropriate solution, ensuring coherent and up-to-date responses. This capability eliminates human error and accelerates resolution times.
Seamless Integration with Collaboration Tools
The agent can be deployed directly in Teams or Slack to receive requests, or interact via a dedicated web interface. It can guide users step by step, suggest screenshots, or provide links to internal tutorials.
In a Swiss SME in the banking sector, the AI agent was configured to automatically draft the body of ITSM tickets as soon as it identifies an incident that can’t be resolved by self-service. This automation reduced ticket logging time by 80% and improved the clarity of information passed to technicians.
Proactive Management and Scheduling
Beyond resolution, the agent can create or update tickets in your ITSM system and even propose time slots in technicians’ calendars based on their availability. The user then receives an invitation to confirm the appointment.
This end-to-end automation minimizes back-and-forth, avoids duplicates, and streamlines the handling of more complex incidents by your technical teams.
Edana: strategic digital partner in Switzerland
We support companies and organizations in their digital transformation
Business Impacts: Up to 60% Ticket Automation
Automating simple requests can reduce ticket volume by up to 60%, while delivering a smoother, more responsive employee experience. ROI can be achieved within months.
Significant Ticket Volume Reduction
On average, an AI agent can automatically process 40–60% of incoming tickets. These mainly involve level-0 incidents: password resets, access requests, standard configurations, and minor bug fixes.
The decreased ticket flow frees technicians to focus on complex requests, integration projects, and security initiatives.
More Bandwidth for Strategic Projects
When IT teams are no longer overwhelmed by basic tasks, they can accelerate cloud migrations, bolster cybersecurity, optimize the information system architecture, or develop custom tools. Time savings directly impact the company’s strategic roadmap.
For example, a healthcare provider in French-speaking Switzerland was able to reallocate 30% of its support resources to an ERP deployment project that had been repeatedly postponed due to capacity constraints.
Employee Experience and Rapid ROI
Employees receive immediate responses to their requests without queues. Frustration decreases, internal satisfaction rises, and productivity improves.
Cost per ticket drops significantly: an AI agent costs only a fraction of a human intervention. Return on investment is often realized in under six months, without compromising service quality.
Strategic Choices: Cloud, On-Premise, and Cross-Department Deployment
An AI agent can be deployed in the cloud or on-premise using a local large language model, meeting Swiss companies’ security and data sovereignty requirements. This model naturally extends to HR, finance, procurement, or compliance services.
Cloud vs. On-Premise: A Crucial Trade-Off
Public cloud deployment offers rapid rollout, near-instant scalability, and continuous updates. It suits organizations with lower data sensitivity. A hybrid architecture can combine the best of both worlds, as in a CloudOps approach.
Security, Compliance, and Data Sovereignty
To comply with Swiss Data Protection Act (FADP) and GDPR regulations, many Swiss companies favor an on-premise AI agent. Data flows remain within the datacenter perimeter, with no external exposure. This approach strengthens data sovereignty.
Beyond IT: A Model for Other Functions
The success of an AI agent in IT support paves the way for other use cases: automating HR requests (certificates, leave), finance (expense reports, invoicing), procurement (equipment orders, supplier approvals), or compliance (document requests, risk monitoring).
Turn Your IT Support into an Innovation Lever
By automating 40–60% of level-0 requests, you free your IT teams for high-value projects. Employee experience improves, security and compliance are enhanced, and ROI materializes quickly.
This first step in the end-to-end digitalization of support functions prepares your organization to become truly augmented, capable of reallocating its resources toward innovation and information system modernization.
Our Edana experts support you in defining the most suitable architecture—hybrid or on-premise—and in deploying an AI agent that is scalable, secure, modular, and free from vendor lock-in.
