Every tech employee knows the specific dread of dealing with the internal IT helpdesk. You need access to a software application or an internal group, so you submit a ticket, wait three days, get routed to a broken wiki link, and wonder why working at a modern tech company occasionally feels so analog. SaaS promised to streamline internal operations, but for most scaling companies, it just scattered institutional knowledge across dozens of disconnected apps.
San Francisco-based startup Risotto wants to fix this by replacing the traditional ticket queue with an autonomous AI teammate that lives entirely inside Slack. Today, the company is showcasing exactly what its agentic platform can do via a major rollout with enterprise video platform Vidyard, which managed to automate 80% of its Tier-1 IT and internal support requests within just 30 days of deployment.
Here’s the high level on a case study the two companies published:
Moving From Simple Search to Programmatic Action
For a decade-old company like Vidyard with over 100 employees, institutional knowledge was deeply siloed across Confluence, Google Drive, and endless legacy Slack channels. Without a single source of truth, employees regularly defaulted to pinging busy IT teams for simple answers , creating an operational bottleneck that drained productivity across the business.
Vidyard’s Head of IT and Security, Vergil Smith, deployed Risotto, branded internally as “Yardley“, to act as an intelligent corporate switchboard.
“We have lean teams, and we simply don’t have the bandwidth to manually field the same repetitive questions over and over again,” said Smith.
But this isn’t just another basic ChatGPT wrapper that hallucinates answers from a uploaded PDF. While Risotto uses advanced natural language processing to parse messy, real-world employee questions and surface company-approved answers , its real power lies in cross-platform orchestration.
When a Vidyard employee DMs Yardley asking to join an engineering group, the AI doesn’t just link them to a policy document. It automatically parses the request , verifies eligibility , pings the appropriate manager for approval directly inside Slack , and hooks into Okta and Google Workspace to provision the access automatically. Once the workflow is complete, it logs the entire interaction as a structured audit trail inside Jira without requiring a single stroke of human data entry.
The Hard Metrics of Helpdesk Autonomy
In an enterprise software market currently flooded with vague AI promises, Risotto is leading with stark, audited performance metrics from its first month in production:
- High Volume Management: The platform successfully fields between 300 to 500 support requests each month for Vidyard.
- 60% Time Reduction: Core ticket resolution times fell by more than half, crashing down to an average of under two hours compared to the typical 4-to-6-hour manual wait.
- Unassisted Autonomy: Out of 275 pure automation requests, the platform handled 80% completely unassisted without requiring human IT intervention.
- 94% Cumulative Success: Out of 373 total tickets processed by the system, 350 were successfully brought to a resolution.
- Rapid Response Velocity: Employees received initial contextual answers in an average of just 3 minutes.
Beyond clearing out ticket queues, the 24/7 availability of an autonomous teammate has shifted company culture. Vidyard notes that new hires ramp up significantly faster because they feel free to ask an unlimited number of operational onboarding questions without the friction of bothering busy colleagues. Crucially, it has cleared the deck for Vidyard’s core IT and security teams to focus on high-value infrastructure projects, vendor security assessments, and active incident response protocols.
Disruption in the ITSM Arena
The internal operations and IT Service Management (ITSM) space is an incredibly lucrative arena ripe for an existential shakeup. Legacy giants like ServiceNow and Atlassian’s Jira have built multi-billion-dollar empires on software architectures that ultimately require heavy human labor to move tickets from point A to point B.
The venture ecosystem is betting heavily that agentic AI will transform these internal cost centers. Risotto is hitting the market with institutional backing from Bonfire Ventures, 645 Ventures, and Y Combinator, alongside angel backing from founders and tech executives at Gusto, Dropbox, and HelloSign. The startup has already quietly built an enterprise roster, earning trust from major organizations including Ironclad, Thoughtspot, Jobber, and Gusto itself.
With a native Intercom integration and more complex identity management pipelines currently in active development, Risotto isn’t just trying to build a better chatbot. It’s positioning itself as the fully autonomous operational backbone of the modern enterprise. If they can replicate Vidyard’s 80% ticket automation rate across the rest of the corporate world, the traditional helpdesk ticket might finally become a relic of the past.
Read the full case study at: https://www.tryrisotto.com/customers/vidyard-automates-80-percent-tier-1-it-requests-with-risotto
