Generative AI is speeding up the provision of helpdesk support, enabling IT teams to shave hours off every incident they handle.
By freeing up IT teams from the grind of repetitive troubleshooting and giving them back time to focus on higher-value work, helpdesk services are able to become more proactive while improving both efficiency and the overall quality of support.
That’s according to the 2025 State of ITSM Report from SolarWinds, which tracked more than 60,000 anonymised data points from over 2,000 service desks worldwide to provide the clearest evidence yet of the measurable “AI effect” on IT support performance.
The report found, for example, that average incident resolution times fell sharply after organisations enabled GenAI as part of their service desk workflows.
Before GenAI was introduced, incidents took around 27.5 hours to resolve. After GenAI was enabled, that figure dropped to just over 22.5 hours, saving almost five hours on every single ticket.
Among the top 10 GenAI adopters cited in the report, the improvement was even more marked, with average resolution times slashed from just under 51 hours to just over 23 hours per incident. That’s a huge time-saving of nearly 28 hours on every ticket they handled.
GenAI cuts resolution time
The research also examined the efficiency gap between those who have adopted GenAI and those yet to invest. Again, the findings couldn’t be clearer. It found that non-GenAI customers resolved enquiries in just under 33 hours, while GenAI-enabled teams were closing incidents in 22.5 hours – a saving of almost 10 hours per ticket.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re part of an IT team responsible for delivering tech support, or a user looking for help – the outcome is pretty much the same. The introduction of GenAI has a significant impact on the speed of response and ticket resolution.
“The data we analysed shows the increasing performance gap between teams
adopting AI and those that aren’t,” said the report. “While GenAI isn’t a standalone solution, these figures indicate it plays an important role in enabling faster resolution, especially
when combined with existing ITSM best practices.”
And that’s an important distinction to make. In other words, those organisations implementing GenAI are often the same ones developing other functionality, such as self-service portals and knowledge management to create a service desk that is “resilient, scalable, and prepared for future challenges”.
ITSM requires smart solutions
While these findings could be viewed on their own, they build on the narrative established in last year’s State of ITSM Report, which challenged the long-held belief that helpdesks could simply solve all their problems by either hiring more people, increasing budgets, or both.
That research showed that the real drivers of efficiency were operational discipline and smart use of tools, not simply increasing headcount. It highlighted how mature service desks – those that had invested in automation, self-service, and knowledge sharing, for example – already had an advantage over those that had failed to keep pace with the times.
For me, this year’s report shines a spotlight on how GenAI is part of that ongoing, forward-thinking drive for improvement. As the 2024 report makes clear: “Achieving optimal efficiency in IT service management requires more than just reactive measures; it involves strategic investments in the right technologies and processes.
“Automation, self-service portals, and knowledge base articles stand out as key solutions that empower service desks to reduce ticket resolution times, streamline operations, and enhance overall service quality.
“These tools do more than handle repetitive tasks – they transform the way service desks operate by shifting the focus from manual interventions to proactive, user-driven solutions. Automation eliminates time-consuming processes, self-service portals enable users to resolve issues independently, and knowledge-based articles provide both users and agents with the information they need to address problems swiftly and accurately.”
GenAI is the next chapter of IT support
Factor in GenAI and IT teams are better prepared than ever to address the most pressing question: How do you resolve more tickets in less time without increasing the size of your teams?
For me, this latest report is part of an ongoing effort to deepen our understanding of how IT support really works and how we can create better outcomes. It’s grounded in detailed, thorough analysis, but when you step back from the numbers, three clear takeaways stand out.
First, GenAI is already making significant contributions to the pace and efficiency of day-to-day support. And second, that the biggest gains come when AI is used in conjunction with other best practices.
But perhaps the most marked takeaway is that the gap between adopters and non-adopters is widening. As GenAI becomes a natural part of the support workflow, teams using it are moving faster and operating with far greater resilience. That’s the direction the industry is heading. These findings couldn’t make that any clearer.
