IT support is changing fast, and the old service desk model is starting to feel like a relic from another era. In this episode, I spoke with Samuele Gantner, Chief Product Officer at Nexthink, about what comes next and what companies need to do now to prepare for it. With Nexthink sitting at the forefront of Digital Employee Experience (DEX) technology, Samuele offers a grounded, thoughtful look at what a "ticketless" future might look like.
One of the boldest predictions shared is a 90 percent reduction in IT support tickets by 2027. That is not marketing spin. It's a vision rooted in practical shifts toward proactive support, real-time observability, and AI-powered automation. Samuele explains how organizations can move away from reactive models by embracing intelligent agents that solve problems before a ticket is even raised. Instead of asking employees to fix things themselves, IT support is quietly transforming into something far more sophisticated and intuitive.
We talked about what drives this change, from millennial and Gen Z expectations to the technological leap enabled by large language models and automation. Samuele breaks down why old attempts at self-service failed and how today's AI agents are finally equipped to handle objective complexity with empathy, scale, and context.
He also shares examples that bring this future to life, including a retailer that avoided a costly outage through predictive alerts, a healthcare provider saving millions through experience-driven device refreshes, and an energy firm preventing disaster in a virtual desktop environment. These are not theoretical case studies. They are live proof that DEX is not just buzz. It works.
We also explored what skills IT teams need to thrive in this shift. It is not all about tech. Emotional intelligence, cross-functional collaboration, and a proactive mindset are just as important. Whether you're a CIO or a support engineer, there is something here that will challenge how you think about IT's role in the business.
[00:00:04] Try and imagine a world where IT support no longer relied on tickets, queues, P1 or P4 calls or reactive fixes. Well in today's episode we're going to sit down with the Chief Product Officer at Nexthink and together we're going to explore what a ticketless future for IT could look like and how close we really are to making that happen.
[00:00:29] And with Nexthink recently named leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Digital Employee Experience Management Tools for the second year running, my guest brings with him a wealth of insights on how proactive AI-powered systems are already changing how IT functions at scale. What does that mean for the traditional service desk?
[00:00:53] And I want to talk about how a 90% reduction in IT tickets by 2027 isn't just a vision, it's an achievable outcome when observability, automation and AI agents all converge, all come together. And my guest will walk us through Nexthink's approach to digital employee experience or DEX and how proactive alerting, sentiment analysis and intelligent agents are already helping global enterprises
[00:01:23] not only avoid outages but save millions and improve workforce satisfaction. But IT support teams do need to shift that mindset from break-fix to experience-driven operations. And yes, emotional intelligence, cross-functional collaboration and an entrepreneurial mindset, these are just a few of the areas that will define the next generation of IT roles.
[00:01:48] So whether you are leading an enterprise tech strategy or just trying to modernise internal support, we're going to try and break down today what's working in the real world today, right now. From US retailers of how they're avoiding outages through proactive alerts to healthcare and energy companies optimising performance with data-driven decisions. And then we're going to put the microphone back over to you.
[00:02:13] How prepared are you and your organisation for this shift to ticketless support? And what small changes could you make to get started today? Because we're not gazing into crystal balls here. A lot of what we're going to talk about is already available. So prepare to be inspired as I officially introduce you to today's guest. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today.
[00:02:40] Can you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Hi, Neil. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's really a pleasure to be on your show. My name is Sam. I'm Chief Product Officer at Nextink. And we're the company behind the digital employee experience. I'm sure we're going to have an opportunity to explore that topic today together, right? Yeah. And I'm really looking forward to exploring so much with you today.
[00:03:04] Many, many years ago in another lifetime, I started out on an IT service desk. And one of the reasons I bring that up is nearly three quarters of IT professionals now believe that that traditional service desk will disappear within the next three years. So why is the shift happening now? And what do you think are the biggest drivers of this change from what you're seeing out there? Look, I believe we hit an inflection point in this period, really in two areas. One is workforce demographics. Yeah.
[00:03:34] And the second one is also technologically. Let me elaborate a bit. When we think about the demographics today, we're in a stage where millennials and Gen Z combined, they come for about 60% of the working population, right? And these are generations that grew up with cell phones, you know, instant access to information, to technology. And for them, you know, submitting a ticket and waiting 48 hours for a resolution, it feels archaic, you know, stone age kind of things.
[00:04:05] Even, you know, we did a survey, we call it the death and rebirth of the service desk, and we served about 1,000 IT professionals. And an interesting stat coming from that was that 76% of IT professionals, they say that employees have resistance to deploying their own fixes. And that's not because they don't know how to do it, but just because they don't want to do it, because they don't need to do it at home. They grew up in a different way of thinking and acting, right?
[00:04:34] So this is a massive drive towards changing the existing model of the service desk. Now, there's also the second factor, which is the technology factor. And I believe the core here is that before recently, it was just not viable to change the model. And people tried, right? We tried for many years. But every single type of problem had to be manually developed in terms of automation, in terms of self-healing.
[00:05:03] We had all these no code, low code solutions, but it was still not enough. At the end of the day, the cost of eliminating the service desk was higher than just status quo. And there was no strong demand for that. So this is why these two things are changing now, the demographic and the technology, and we're really seeing a revolution happening today. And for a lot of reasons, I think it could be a good thing, because I think instead of doing value-add project work, getting more projects over the line to keep up the pace with the speed of technology,
[00:05:33] many workers, IT workers have been caught on that service desk doing things like password resets, account creations, providing access to files. And a lot of that stuff could be automated with AI and things. And I think you predicted a 90% reduction in IT tickets by 2027. So what steps need to be taken, do you think, to reach a goal like that? And how do automation and AI contribute and fit into that picture? There are really two ways to eliminate tickets.
[00:06:03] The first one is moving from a reactive to a proactive approach. Now, that sounds obvious, but it's not so easy to put in place, right? Yeah. Now, to move from reactive to proactive, there are several dimensions around that. The first one is automation. If you put in place automation and you ensure the foundations of a healthy state, things like, you know, making sure that your Intune agent is working,
[00:06:27] that the security posture of the device is guaranteed, that the device gets updated, gets rebooted, that the disk is fine, that the network is stable and so on and so forth. Those are all things that you can automate for the majority of the cases. And down the line, they will solve a lot of incidents, a lot of problems. You know, if your Intune agent stops working today, nobody will notice. Nobody will open a ticket. But down the line, it will create problems, right? So that's the first one, automation for a desired state, if you want.
[00:06:56] The second one is changing the way that we do change management. And I would like to call it proactive change management, which in theory is part of the definition in practice. It doesn't really happen. So the majority of problems that we experience, the majority of major incidents are related to unforeseen consequences of some sort of change that we do in the environment. And here the key is, check the impact before you hit the button.
[00:07:23] And then finally, it's about real time observability. So this is borderline between reactive and proactive. But if you can be alerted as soon as something changes, as soon as something abnormal is happening, then very often you can prevent a widespread incident from occurring. Right. Maybe you can catch it right before it gets all over the place. And these are the components of moving from proactive to reactive.
[00:07:52] Sorry, the opposite from reactive to proactive, obviously. Now, that's the foundation. The second piece is about using technology and using IT agents to solve IT problems for employees. And here we need to forget about phone tickets. We need to forget about the traditional chat point model. What we need and what we can do today is have intelligent agents that are able to solve the problem on the fly with a simple chat.
[00:08:22] It's incredibly cool. And I must admit, as someone that still gets flashbacks from hundreds of support tickets every day and also exploring ways on how to help the service desk reduce those tickets, the concept on its own of a zero ticket future sounds incredibly exciting and ambitious in equal measures.
[00:08:40] So do you see that as achievable across all industries or will it depend on a company's maturity, tech readiness, etc. or any challenges that might stop this from happening? What are you seeing here? Look, I do believe there are challenges, but I also believe that any company, any industry can achieve that. There's a few ingredients that we need, though, right? The first one is a technology aspect.
[00:09:07] We need to embrace certain type of technology that are possible today. And here, AI is really changing the game. So if you think about, you know, maybe at the time you were explaining why you were doing it. Automation at the time basically meant that people would do a ticket analysis, identify the major call drivers, you know, the 80% calls caused by the 20% of the most common problems.
[00:09:35] And then they would take one of these at the time and try to find ways to automate that, you know, password reset, accessing granting access, these problems and so forth. But all of this automation was kind of fragile. And it was fragile to changes, fragile to small variations in the environment. And the success rate was kind of relatively low, right? And on top of that, it required a lot of work, a lot of manual work, a lot of experts in order to do all of these things.
[00:10:03] Now, AI can solve this much more broadly and especially with much less configuration. And the key around that is really to give to AI the tools that it needs to be successful, right? And it's a little bit like humans. We need three things to be successful at tasks. The first one, we need knowledge of the past. We need experience, right? Experienced people are usually better at solving things than unexperienced people. And this is really understanding past tickets, past incidents, past behavior, but past telemetry as well.
[00:10:33] Then you need visibility in the present. So you need to be able to understand right now what is going on. What are the root causes for this particular problem that happened three seconds ago? These are sight if you do the analogy with humans. And then finally, you need to give to AI the ability to interact with the environment. That's our hands if we think about people, right? And that's what, you know, a full-dex observability platform, that's what usually they provide.
[00:11:01] So if you have that, then you can really start to change the game. So you need that technology maturity in certain ways or form, but it's a technology maturity that relies less on having a lot of people doing manual tasks and more on automating things. But then there is also a process and environment concept around that because AI alone is not the magic solution.
[00:11:27] And companies, they must be willing to take action, willing to switch to a proactive mindset. It's really a question of mindset more than everything. And, you know, reinvest some of the savings that they get through AI in order to be able to start that virtuous cycle. And I think it's important to highlight we're not talking about replacing people with AI. There is so much work required in every organization.
[00:11:55] And there's even a growing momentum behind repurposing frontline support from those reactive firefighters that are fighting tech problems day in, day out, and getting back to adding value and even improving their employee experience on that side of things. What does that transition look like inside a typical IT team, would you say? Yeah, it's a huge opportunity for people in end user computing.
[00:12:20] By the way, according to the survey, 97% of IT workers are extremely excited about some of the things that are coming because this technology, I think we're lucky to have the opportunity to live in this period, right? In terms of really being able to drive this change, you know, there are a few things that I've observed in successful companies. The first thing is that they put in place some form of measure of success, right? You cannot fix what you cannot measure.
[00:12:49] And intuitively, if you want to reduce tickets, you would say, okay, my key metric is ticket count, right? But initially, that's not necessarily the best one. And the reason for that is that tickets will go down eventually, but maybe not at the beginning. Actually, as you reestablish trust with employees, ticket count might initially increase a little bit because people will start reporting problems that they didn't report before. Because now they start believing that you can actually do something about that, right?
[00:13:18] So, for me, the best metric is not ticket count, but you need a metric that is, you know, objectively measuring the experience of employees. And also, you need subjective feedback from the employees. And then you need to combine the two. And then use ticket count later on as a secondary metric. And then you really need to start this virtual cycle.
[00:13:37] And what this means is that you need an initial investment in people to perform this initial reactive to proactive approach, starting to get the first wins, right? And with these first wins, you will see the amount of reactive work will start to decrease. And with that decreasing, you can take some of the folks that were doing reactive work and reinvest them into automation and DEX operations.
[00:14:06] Now, the key to success around all of that is really breaking down silos. We have this concept of DEX operations, right? And maybe just one second to define it. It's something that is inspired by dev operations that is happening in software development. And it's really this proactive data-driven practice that brings together IT operations, support, engineering teams to monitor and automate in real time. And the key success factor for that is breaking down the silos, right?
[00:14:35] You need the endpoint and software deployment teams. They need to shift from a mass deployment to more predictive or experience-based deployment model. You need the problem management teams. They need to look much more at telemetry data and observability rather than ticket counts and ticket surges. You need network operations team starting to work in proactively towards the environment where they detect problem. Hardware team, they need to switch from traditional renewal-based policies to experience-based.
[00:15:05] So all of these things, they need to start to communicate together. And this is really the key that I've seen successful organizations that are able to break down those IT silos. And the concept of self-service IT has been discussed for a long time. I remember in IT teams 20 years ago, it was a huge topic, but it hasn't always delivered. So what do you think has shifted now to make it more effective today and finally deliver on that promise?
[00:15:31] Look, I feel that the fundamental issue here really relies on how we define self-service or even, you know, how many times have we talked about the shift left? Yeah. And the way that I started looking at that recently is that self-service, what it really means is delegating level one work to the employees. So I started looking at that with a relatively negative connotation, if you want.
[00:15:58] And the reason for that is that the previous attempts at doing that, in the majority of the cases, were focused on reducing IT cost rather than improving employee experience. And that's a problem. That's a fundamental problem. So we had the chatbots that were kind of glorified search engines for KB articles that then we would just give to people and say, okay, follow the manual and fix it yourself.
[00:16:24] We tried with these self-service portals, you know, often hard to navigate, often ineffective. And this is why when I look at this, I prefer to talk about ticketless support powered by AI agents that can really solve problems for employees rather than self-service. But ticketless support is a better definition for me. And that's a combination of large language models, automations and observability.
[00:16:53] The key around that is that LLMs today are able to understand very easily the intent and the problem that somebody is expressing. And often they do that better than humans, right? They're available 24-7. There's no waiting times. They speak all languages. And in the past, the software vendors had to invest so many resources into NLP natural language processing, and it wasn't that great. Now with LLMs becoming a commodity, this is much more accessible from a technology standpoint.
[00:17:20] And then, you know, these agents can be trained to understand the actual root causes across millions of tickets, petabytes of real-time data, something that is impossible for humans to do. Every failure that an IT agent, AI powered experiences, it becomes an opportunity to learn.
[00:17:42] And what we're seeing is that the role of humans is shifting from executing this mechanical repetitive task into supervising the artificial intelligence and teaching to the artificial intelligence when it fails, and also establishing boundaries to artificial intelligence because that's fundamental, right? We need to think about what are the boundaries, what is it that we allow AI to do, and what is something that we see we want to remain in control with humans, with people.
[00:18:13] And to bring to life everything we're talking about today, including that future of a ticketless support, are you able to share any real-world examples of how proactive IT is already helping to detect and resolve issues before they even begin to impact productivity? Any stories spring to mind that would just bring to life what we're talking about here? Look, Neil, I think we could spend the next three hours sharing those stories.
[00:18:40] But it's a great time because in the last four weeks I attended three DEX events in New York, Paris and Frankfurt. And we had many great names in the industry from end user computing coming to these events and sharing testimonials on how they solved some of these things. So I want to share three very quick examples. The first one is a large retailer in the US that used real-time alerting and anomalies detection to really do something, etc.
[00:19:07] So basically they had this complex system and they received a proactive alert thanks to their telemetry indicating that one of the data center by a large software provider had issues. And this was before any ticket was raised. So they called the provider, they informed them that there was a problem with network availability, and the provider learned that from them. So even the internal monitoring the provider didn't detect that.
[00:19:35] And with that, within two hours, they were able to reroute the traffic to a different data center. And then after that, they announced the outage globally and outside. So what that means for these for this retailer is that thanks to this early observability, they were able to completely avoid a very large outage. And they just had a small moment of downtime that was very limited in impact. So that's a that's a huge win story right around proactive alerting proactive IT.
[00:20:02] And we had another story, this one from the from the Paris event where it was a healthcare organization sharing this. And basically, they set up a custom, intelligent hardware refresh dashboard. And this is about, you know, when you buy new computers, right? And they moved from a purchasing model that was based on warranty expiring to a purchasing model that was based on experience driven refresh.
[00:20:28] So basically, they changed the devices when they're not able to deliver enough experience anymore, but they keep them otherwise. And with that, they unlock saving for more than 5 million euros while improving the DEX score at the same time. So better experience and a ton of money saved, which is also, you know, it's less towards incident, but it's also a way to be proactive, right? If you can, you can free money, you can free resources, you can reinvest it in things that are more, more worth it.
[00:20:55] And then the last one, look, larger energy company, highly virtualized. So we're talking about a big VDI environment. And they switched to a proactive model when they package the new VDI images. And so basically what they do is that they use the telemetry to understand what is the impact of a new image. And in that case, they identified that a new version of an application that we're putting in the image would have increased resource usage by 12%.
[00:21:24] Now, if you do that in the traditional environment, it's not a big deal. 12% more, yeah, maybe people will notice, but it's not catastrophic. If you do that in VDI, where by definition you want to run at 95% capacity to really, you know, optimize cost, then you risk a catastrophic failure. But because of the predictive analytics, they saw that before deploying the image and they could correct. If they had not done that, it was a small change, might not have gone through proper testing.
[00:21:54] They might have brought down the whole environment for hours. So there's just three stories amongst that many, but there's so much to gain by shifting the mindset towards a proactive approach. And I think those stories really bring it to life. I can hear those light bulb moments going off with people listening around the world. And as that traditional service desk evolves into something that's more of a digital experience operation center,
[00:22:20] what new skills should IT leaders and support teams be starting to develop now and preparing their teams for this shift? Any advice there? You know, very often when I have this conversation with people, they always expect that I tell them, you know, they need to invest into learning AI, learning coding, learning automation. Yeah, all of that for sure. But the real skills for me are emotional intelligence is the first one.
[00:22:51] Emotional intelligence because it is, it's no longer just about fixing devices, right? It's becoming about supporting people in moments of friction, in moments of frustration when they're confused. It's becoming so much broader than that. It's about their whole experience. It's about understanding how we can empower everybody, every employee to really be able to do their best in the, in the, the work in the best possible way. Right?
[00:23:18] And so this is about listening with empathy, reading between the lines, responding in a human way, not just technical, you know, for the technology, we're going to have AI, but we need to, we need humans to be human if you want. So that's skill number one for me. Skill number two, I touched that a little bit earlier. A key success criteria is collaboration and cross-functional agility. So DexOps spans across infrastructure, software automation, user engagement.
[00:23:47] So you need people that are able to break these team boundaries to go proactively find collaboration in other department, drive coordinated improvements instead of just, you know, isolate. And then self in a basement and fixing problems. And maybe the last one is a little bit of a entrepreneurial automation mindset. Uh, and, and more than, than a technology skill is really a mindset, right?
[00:24:13] It's about, uh, um, support teams moving to a way of thinking that is much more like automation architects. And, and that means having this thing in your head that if you need to do something more than once, you need to automate it more than once equal automation. It's like when I was a developer, you know, the first thing that they teach you, uh, you know, if you need to repeat a line of code more than once, you need to put it in a, in a, in a loop, right? Uh, rather than duplicating the code.
[00:24:42] And this is the same more than once equals automation. So emotional and intelligence collaboration and automation mindset critical skills for, for these things to develop. Fantastic advice. And I always try and give all my listeners a valuable takeaway. So if there's somebody listening anywhere in the world and that organization is still operating with that traditional reactive service desk model, they need, they know they need to do something different.
[00:25:07] What is the most practical first move towards modernizing it support and towards that, that utopia that we're talking about today, but you don't need to do it overnight. But what would that starting point be? The best case, you need to start by establishing ownership, right? So the best case and the thing that I've seen by far the most successful is when the company starts by nominating a VP or senior director of digital experience or a similar title.
[00:25:37] Right. But you take a senior leader and you give them responsibility and accountability for that. And you give them the authority to make a change and to drive a change. Now, that's ideal. But it's not always possible because obviously it requires executive buy in. It requires this kind of top down approach. So if it's possible, great. Do that. If not, you don't need to wait for the perfect conditions.
[00:26:07] I've seen it so many times where, you know, a great starting point is to create a DEX practice within existing IT teams. And it can be small at first. It doesn't, it doesn't need to be huge. Right. So what I've seen successful companies do is to assign some of the most curious and entrepreneurial team members to this DEX practice. And those are people that naturally think beyond tickets. They want to solve root causes at scale.
[00:26:35] And then they give them the mandate and also the space, the time, the opportunity to explore these proactive improvements. And obviously, this approach takes more time than your VP of digital experience. But the results usually are there. And with this result, you know, companies can use that to influence senior leadership in order to make a change. So that's a little bit of a second approach that I've also seen a bit longer, but very successful.
[00:27:04] And at the end, it's about, you know, also being able to acknowledge and communicate the tradeoffs. Right. When you do that, you need to accept that some of the team members will have to carry a little bit more reactive work until you become better of being proactive. But as long as there is acknowledgement of that and, you know, everybody's on board, this can be extremely successful.
[00:27:26] And as for yourselves at Next Thing, you've got a huge reputation as a leader in digital employee experience management software or DEX for short. You've also been named the leader in 2025 Gartner's Magic Quadrant for digital employee experience management tools for the second year in a row. It feels like an exciting time for you, too, right? Anything you can share about your vision for the future, what you're working on?
[00:27:54] Look, it's an extremely exciting time for us. We always believed that, you know, the role of IT is much bigger. It's much bigger than what is perceived. Think about it. Think about it at the end of the day. The reason why I have computers, network infrastructure, all of that is not because people want to use an operating system. Right.
[00:28:15] It's because people use applications to be more productive at work, to have a more seamless experience, to be closer to their friends and colleagues. Right. And given all of that, the mission of IT has always been seeing like break, fix, troubleshooting, all of that, but it's so much bigger. Actually, the mission of IT is one of the most exciting mission on the planet is to make us better as humans. Right.
[00:28:40] By giving us the tools to go beyond the limits of our brains, of our human abilities. Right. And I believe we're really living in a moment right now where the industry is recognizing that. And this concept of digital experience is moving us from this very technical, sometimes perceived as low value troubleshooting into helping employees be the best that they can do.
[00:29:10] And so, you know, I think that the market is really going to move in this direction. Uh, AI automation sentiment, uh, are great keywords of some of the things that are coming and some of the way that the market is being shaped. So I'm personally very, very excited about what is going to come in the next couple of years. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me today, share your invaluable insights.
[00:29:34] But before I let you go, I'm going to ask you to leave one, maybe two final gifts for everyone listening. And that is a book that you'd recommend or has inspired you that we can add to our Amazon wishlist and a song that you can add to our Spotify playlist. Guilty pleasures are allowed, but what would you like to leave everyone listening with and why? Listen, let me start with a book. Yeah. Um, there's a book that when I read that, when I was a kid, I probably read 10 times. And, um, I don't know if you're familiar with that.
[00:30:02] It's called foundation by Isaac Asimov. No, it's a science fiction book. And, uh, in this book, Asimov introduces a concept that is called psycho history, which is basically about using data and, um, foresight to guide the civilization through the chaos that is following the fall of a galactic empire. Right? So it's a, it's, it's a pretty cool concept.
[00:30:24] And now what is interesting is that that really resonates with me with how the X-Ops works because, uh, you know, instead of waiting for things to break, we use real time data and experience to anticipate problems. And just like in this foundation book, it's about, you know, thinking systematically acting early and quietly because the people driving this are quiet group that is, that is hidden in order to shape a better future for humanity. So it's so inspiring.
[00:30:53] And by the way, this is a book that was written between the forties and the fifties. So it's 80, 80 years old, and it's such a great prediction of what is happening now. I really recommend that for, for everybody. And, um, as for the song, um, there is a song, it's called Buena Suerte. And, um, it's by a band from Venezuela called, uh, Las Cuatros Monedas. I'm going to apologize for the pronunciation. Some from the seventies, but it's absolutely perfect for the summer.
[00:31:23] It just puts you in that, uh, you know, mood for holidays. Uh, uh, don't, don't listen to that on a Monday morning, but you know, before the weekend, it's absolutely perfect. Well, I'll get the book added straight to our Amazon wishlist as we're recording this on a Friday. I'm going to put that tune on as soon as we've finished our interview today and get that added to the Spotify playlist. But, uh, finally, before I do let you, uh, finally go for anyone listening wanting to explore anything we talked about today in a little bit more detail,
[00:31:52] maybe they want to contact you or your team or find out more about the kind of work you're doing at next thing and how you're bringing what we're talking about to life. Where would you like to point them? Absolutely. There is a website, next thing.com in there. You can, everybody will be able to find the report and the death and report of the service desk as well as a podcast. It's called the Dex show. Uh, we invite some of the best names in the industry and that's it is available in every post that podcast application. Awesome.
[00:32:20] Well, I'll add links to everything, including that podcast. So I'll be checking that out. And more than anything, I've just loved hearing your vision for a future of ticketless service. And how you're empowering it teams with AI driven user centric insights needed to maybe proactively optimize tech performance, enhance productivity, and yes, reduce tickets, but also cook costs, accelerate employee engagement at scale.
[00:32:46] And in a year where we're talking about the importance of ROI in every tech project, there's a long list of ROI right there. So thank you for sharing that with me today. Thank you so much for having me, Neil. Thank you. So what would your IT team look like if most support issues never even reached your help desk? I think today's conversation with next thing, it painted a clear picture of that exact possibility.
[00:33:12] And a big thank you to Sam for outlining a roadmap towards a more proactive AI hand support where digital experience that becomes the metric that matters and tickets actually become the exception, not the norm. And someone that's worked on a very, very busy service desk many years ago. So this is a huge step forward. And I think also learned today that technology is here, real time observability, automation, intelligent agents.
[00:33:41] These things are already driving a measurable impact. Don't go waiting on the sidelines thinking, oh, yeah, it's not reached the mainstream yet. It has. But that transformational journey that you may need to be going on, it hinges on people every bit as much as platforms. Emotional intelligence, collaboration across IT silos and stakeholder silos scattered around the business and a mindset that prioritizes automation at scale.
[00:34:08] All of these things could be the difference between surface level improvements and lasting change. But leaders don't need to wait for a sweeping reorg to begin, whether you appoint a VP of digital experience or just starting small. Entrepreneurial decks teams inside your existing structure is more about taking that first step. It's ownership. It's curiosity. The rest will simply follow with momentum.
[00:34:34] So if the support model your business runs on was built for another time, what's stopping you from redesigning it for the next? Let me know, as always, techblogwriteroutlook.com, LinkedIn, Instagram, just at Neil C. Hughes. But that is it for today. We've covered a lot of ground there. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. And I'm also going to return again tomorrow with another guest. We've already got one lined up for you and ready to go.
[00:35:00] So hit refresh on your podcast feed in around 12 hours and there'll be another one there. So speak with you all then. Bye for now.