IPsoft’s 1Desk Aims to Be the Cognitive Agent for the OneOffice

The pace of change in the industry is nothing short of astounding. Especially where AI capabilities are involved, we are seeing many projects going from the initial discussion to prototype and proof-of-concept (PoC) literally in a few months. Against this background it may seem surprising that it took IPsoft more than 18 months from the announcement that it would combine the capabilities of its IPcenter and Amelia platform to provide a virtual agent that could deal with helpdesk queries and middle-office business functions by layering cognitive competence on top of an autonomic backbone. Given the code name Apollo that IPsoft had chosen, it is tempting to suggest the project never got off the ground. But unlike many scary scenes at Cape Canaveral, IPsoft took the sensible approach of realizing how ambitious the Apollo project was and that it needed to ascertain the robustness of the solution. Unlike many low-level chatbot projects, the newly branded 1Desk offering is all about end-to-end services for the complexity of IT helpdesk and Level 1 support. Not only that, but with the launch of the 1Desk platform, IPsoft is expanding on the original Apollo blueprint by driving it deeper into business functions like HR, finance, and facilities. This connection between the Amelia and IPcenter platforms attempts to develop the intersection between front and back office in an intelligent manner with an employee-centric value proposition, much like we describe in our HfS OneOffice framework.

The similarities between IPsoft’s 1Desk and HfS’ concept of the OneOffice are by design

Before we discuss the details of 1Desk, here’s one caveat up front. The platform is still in beta and is slated to launch in Q1 2018. Thus, in this report we discuss the strategic intent, the competitive positioning, and first feedback from an early adopter, but there are many moving parts that need to fall into place before we will see market penetration. Nevertheless, as Exhibit 1 clearly outlines, the similarities between the 1Desk and HfS’ model of the OneOffice are by design rather coincidental. The strategic intent is to collapse the barriers between the back, middle, and front offices to enable a digital customer experience. In the lofty world of service management, the digital experience is provided by blending IPsoft’s IPcenter self-remediation capabilities with the virtual agent experience of Amelia.

Exhibit 1: Architectural Overview of 1Desk

Source: HfS Research, IPsoft 2017

What that means in concrete terms can be seen in the following use cases, which can be addressed fully automated or through augmentation of a service desk agent:

• Incident management: Resolve incidents such as logging, creating, escalating, or providing status on a ticket;
• Troubleshooting: Help solve problems like a broken laptop or mouse;
• Service requests:
  • Provide admin access
  • Reset passwords or unlock accounts
  • Enable Citrix access
  • Assist or execute common software installation
  • Process leaver requests and account termination

The advanced technical capabilities that allow 1Desk to perform many of those use cases in an autonomous fashion include:

• Probabilistic root-cause-analysis: Auto-correlate all events with other events in an IT environment; continuous learning complemented by naïve correlation to find the unusual and unique
• Anomaly detection: Algorithms eliminate false positives and find real anomalies; event-based performance metrics find similar events within an environment, even if there is no direct link in the configuration management database (CMDB)
• Integration framework: Real-time integration into enterprise applications; standards-based integration with critical IT systems (CMDB, ticketing, monitoring)
• Advanced analytics and reporting: Embedded analytical platform; user configurable dashboards

While these technical capabilities have been already long established with the IPcenter platform, what is new is that IPsoft is aiming 1Desk squarely at driving these competencies much deeper into business functions. With that, IPsoft follows a path similar to ServiceNow and what it calls Enterprise Service Management. That is evolving from the initial focus on IT service management (ITSM) capabilities toward expanding into business functions such as HR, facilities, and legal, thus overcoming the traditional barrier between IT and business. The 1Desk platform aims to learn and execute any of these defined and repeatable processes. The most common use cases we’ve heard from IPsoft and 1Desk buyer pilots were around HR onboarding processes—new employees who need a laptop, cellphone, permissions setup, and travel accounts, for example. Using the 1Desk platform will theoretically speed up and add to the security of these processes where often human error or lack of communication would cause breakdowns across siloed departments and potential security problems, in particular for regulated industries. Ultimately, the goal is to decrease the costs associated with such activities while improving the efficiency and user (employee) experience. The Amelia cognitive agent (whether named as such, and with or without the avatar) becomes the intermediary between departments and executor of these processes.

IPsoft executives acknowledged that it required Amelia version 3.0 to embark on this ambitious journey. In simple terms, while ServiceNow is providing the single code and data model as well as managing workflows, IPsoft is offering the execution of process steps triggered by ServiceNow (and other systems) as well as the immersive interaction with a virtual agent. This aims to add a level of intelligence and user-friendly experience to the above processes; for example, Amelia is reportedly able to read and digest a ServiceNow catalogue without programming, in the manner a human would. Unsurprisingly, there is a healthy competitive yet synergistic relationship between both the ServiceNow and IPsoft approaches.

The battle for the cornerstone of Intelligent Automation ecosystems in service management is intensifying

To assess the market success of 1Desk, the central question is whether organizations will move to a portfolio approach for conversational services or whether they will focus on a central platform that will go beyond those capabilities by routing customer requests from the interaction all the way to execution at the back end. Thus, 1Desk will both compete with and overlap emerging capabilities of platforms such as ServiceNow or BMC and with lower level standalone chatbot deployments. In that respect, it will be a case of horses for courses. The second central issue is how much virtual experience enterprises want in their service management desk and how much they are willing to pay for those capabilities. Even though IPsoft is offering a complete IT service management solution, it also offers seamless integration with already deployed solutions such as ServiceNow, so 1Desk is pitching those capabilities squarely with the Intelligent Automation push by ServiceNow as well the Cognitive Service Management offering by BMC. Both ServiceNow and BMC are partnering IBM Watson and integrating an expansive set of automation capabilities. While these can be best described as lower level conversational services as opposed to the immersive virtual agent experience of 1Desk, enterprises have even more choices for accelerating Intelligent Automation and progressing toward the OneOffice.

Beyond the specifics of service management, enterprises are starting to experiment with a broad set of chatbots and virtual agents—ranging from the big beast of IBM Watson and Amelia to smaller chatbots like Avaamo and Artificial Solutions and to OpenSource technologies and voice integration with consumer virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa. However, many of those experiments are confined to lower level conversation services such as FAQ lists or linking to knowledge bases, and most have been focused on automating simple self-service queries in the front office versus orchestrating processes within the middle and back offices of the enterprise. Therefore, HfS expects that many enterprises will move to a portfolio approach and complex ecosystems rather than rely on a single platform. Exhibit 2 highlights the evolution of service agents as well as the segmentation of the respective technology building blocks that form those ecosystems:

Exhibit 2: The Evolving Landscape of Service Agents

Source: HfS Research 2017

IPsoft is acknowledging these emerging ecosystems by providing integrations into the leading ITSM systems like Remedy, ServiceNow, or Jira. Similarly, it is integrating monitoring capabilities of the likes of AppDynamics. But in contrast to IPcenter, 1Desk is offering connectors for leading SaaS platforms like Workday, Peoplesoft, or Concur with use cases such as key word search, which deepens the capability in the enterprise within business functions. Different from the world of RPA, the center of gravity in service management is the service ticket. Thus, the direction of travel for IPsoft is toward the elimination of Level 1 agents and, over time, the ticket itself. IPsoft is even branding its 1Desk offering with the catchy but yet-to-be proven “The End of Tickets – The Beginning of Smart Service.”

However, success hinges not only on technology capabilities but also more importantly on the commercial framework. HfS spoke to some enterprises that were uneasy about the pricing or contractual terms of implementing an artificial intelligence solution, such as ServiceNow or Amelia. While the upfront license cost was deemed less steep than suggested by anecdotal evidence, they were serious concerns about follow up cost for issues like API calls or other add-ons. IPsoft executives suggested that their contractual options range from an enterprise license to more transactional elements such as successfully concluded transactions. With that in mind, the market needs much more transparency on the commercial implications of platforms like 1Desk. IPsoft executives suggested that the average implementation time for Amelia has come down to three months, thus reinforcing suggestions that the upfront costs are not as high as many had suggested for Amelia and Watson implementations—in part due to a stated focus and investment from IPsoft on developing the trained resources needed to deliver more efficient implementations and do differ by type of use case required.

The 1Desk offering, as with Amelia, has the additional challenge of appealing to and resonating with business users—and developing those inroads with various stakeholders within the enterprise. As the 1Desk platform has the capability to be used throughout HR, finance, and administration, the focus and entry point for 1Desk is broad and may be unclear for organizations without a strong business and IT relationship structure and aligned automation goals. This governance and alignment is also crucial for the success of 1Desk within the middle-office processes. As one 1Desk early adopter put it: “You have to clean up your environment first. If you’re going to go in without first automating as much as you can in the back office with well-defined tasks, it will take years.”

Bottom Line: An immersive virtual service management experience requires proactive change management

For 1Desk to evolve into the cognitive agent for the OneOffice, many issues have to be addressed. First and foremost, as with any Intelligent Automation building blocks, change management has to come to the fore. As a virtual agent has the capability to supplant human agents, the industry can’t hide any longer behind shallow statements of just liberating agents from mundane tasks and taking the robot out of the human. It’s critical to be transparent about how cognitive agents will impact human work and figure out how it can work for people in their favor.

IPsoft needs also to demonstrate client experiences early on. As 1Desk is meant to accelerate the journey toward end-to-end automation, the impact on clients will be significant, not least because of the envisioned integration into business applications. IPsoft’s clients are seeking not only the financial impacts of cost savings but also of service improvement. Therefore, sharing the lessons learned by early deployments will be invaluable. At the same time, IPcenter was largely a managed service, thus we need to the proof points that 1Desk is going beyond that by providing autonomous processes and real-time interactions. If this is truly the “age of the employee,” as IPsoft is putting forth with the 1Desk value proposition, it is up to them to demonstrate how 1Desk intelligently supports those employees for real impact in the big-picture vision of the Digital OneOffice.