Purchasing Guides / IT Help Desk Requests

IT Help Desk Requests

A purchasing guide to buying a workflow that answers routine employee IT questions from your own help articles and turns other requests into complete, correctly routed tickets for your IT team.

Yearly running cost

Assuming 4,800 requests a year

By hand: $25.6K / year; 640 hours of work
Subscription: $1.1K+ / year
This workflow: $98 / year; Machine usage only; setup, hosting and review are extra.

What should it handle?

Answer routine IT questions from your own help articles and turn everything else into a complete ticket for your IT team.

Answer and route requestsSourced answers, follow-up questions and ticket drafts$936 – 2,640 setupConnect my service desk and access approvalsTickets filed and listed access changes after approval$1,800 – 5,040 setup

Your IT team owns access decisions. No password resets, admin rights or account changes without approval.

What is included

Answer how-to questions from approved articles with a citation, ask for missing details, set category and priority, and hand everything else to your IT queue as a complete ticket draft.

Start with your approved help articles, request categories, queues and a set of past requests your IT team has labelled. The connected option files tickets in your service desk and runs listed access changes only after the named approver says yes.

How reliable should answers and routing be?

Answering many questions is not enough. Choose how often answers must be right and sourced, how often tickets reach the right queue and which requests must always go to a person.

StandardSourced answers for routine questions, with anything unclear handed to your IT team.Correct sourced answers: ≥90%Correct category and queue: ≥90%IncludedStrictA second check on every answer and more tests on sensitive requests.Correct sourced answers: ≥95%Correct category and queue: ≥95%Setup +$216 – 720My own targetsAgree your own acceptance requirements with the provider.Quote separately

How these standards are measured

Test on held-out past requests and a separate set of difficult cases: unclear requests, requests for admin rights, possible phishing or security incidents, and questions your articles do not cover. An answer without a supporting article counts as wrong, and an account change without approval fails the release.

Targets for your selected standard
What is checked	Target
Correct sourced answersAn answer passes only when your IT team agrees it is correct and it cites an approved article that supports it. Unsourced answers count as failures.	≥90%
Correct category and queueTickets whose category, priority and queue match the IT team's label, divided by all tickets in the test set.	≥90%
Sensitive requests handed overLabelled security reports, admin-rights requests and out-of-policy requests sent to a person, divided by all such labelled requests.	≥98%
Changes with approvalEvery account or access change must have a recorded approval from the named approver before it runs. Any exception fails the release.	≥100%

An answer is only as good as the article behind it. When no approved article covers the question, the workflow says so and opens a ticket instead of guessing.

How quickly should employees get a first response?

Choose how quickly an employee sees an answer, a follow-up question or a ticket. Time your IT team takes to resolve a ticket is separate.

Within 30 secondsIncludedWithin 15 secondsSetup +$144 – 480Within 8 secondsSetup +$288 – 840

Timing details

Time from receiving the request to the first posted response, including article search, model calls, ticket creation and retries. Confirm the request mix and hardware with your provider.

The target applies to at least 95% of agreed test runs, with 5 in progress at a time.

How much do you want to spend per request?

Choose the machine budget for reading the request, searching your articles and writing the response.

Up to $0.25IncludedUp to $0.12Setup +$72 – 360Up to $0.08Setup +$216 – 600

Cost details

Includes model calls, retries and a shared hosting allocation. Your service desk, identity provider, chat licences and IT staff time are separate. Long conversations and repeated runs also use resources.

Reference machine cost: $0.07 – 0.17 per request at 400 requests a month. The selected cap is a target to test, not a replacement for this estimate.

Where do you want it to run?

Run it in your cloud or on your own server. Choose whether request text may go to an approved AI service.

Run it onAI model access

Data and access details

Runs in a cloud account you control, with access controls and logs.

Only the request text and matching articles go to the selected external model, with secrets masked. Agree access and retention first.

Give the workflow its own service accounts with the smallest permissions it needs. Mask passwords, recovery codes and personal data before any model call. Private model only keeps request text on your hardware; the workflow still connects to your own chat, ticket and identity systems.

How do you want to use it?

Use a request page, your team chat or your current AI agent. You can choose more than one.

A request web pageEmployees ask a question or submit a request on a page, and the IT team works the hand-off queue.IncludedMy team chatEmployees ask in a Slack or Microsoft Teams channel and get an answer or a ticket in the same thread.Setup +$144 – 480My existing AI agentLet your agent submit requests and read answers, ticket status and pending approvals.Setup +$72 – 240

Anything else your provider should know?

Optional. Your choices are included automatically.

Requests per monthYour setup budget (USD)

Your request types, help articles or service desk

Common questions

Do I need this if my service desk already has an AI assistant?

Not necessarily. If an AI service desk subscription already answers from your articles and fits your approvals, keep it. Buy a workflow when you need it in your own environment, on your own model, or fitted to request rules a subscription does not cover.

Can it reset passwords or give people access?

Not in the base option. The connected option can add people to a short list of access groups after the named approver confirms. Password resets and admin rights stay with your IT team unless you agree a separate identity check with the provider.

What happens when there is no help article?

It says it has no approved answer and opens a ticket with the details collected. Your IT team can then write the article so the next question is answered.

Can I run it without an external AI service?

Yes. Choose a private model and supply your own hardware. Measure answer quality and running cost during the pilot.