Refresh: Can Freshworks give you the keys to the AI Castle?
Refresh on Freshworks
The 1,000-5,000 employee part of the market is becoming increasingly interesting, particularly due to the pace of adoption of AI. After three decades of talking about the management of Incident, Problem, Change, Configuration, Knowledge...and later trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get the business to buy into the idea that “the IT way to manage any enterprise services is the best way”, we have entered a new era filled with OOTB (out of the box) automation, focus on end-user and agent experience, and no-code configurability of workflows. All of that is pre-packaged, built with ITIL’s best practices, adequately priced licensing, and with minimal implementation, administration, and development costs needed. What’s the catch? “Well, it depends...” as any experienced consultant would say.
With over 220 software vendors in the market offering (IT/E)SM workflow capabilities, it can be a minefield for a resource-strained Service Management department to navigate - ServiceNow , Hornbill , Atlassian , HaloITSM , ALVAO ITSM , ManageEngine , SolarWinds , Ivanti , BMC Software , IFS assyst ...which is where you can rely on your consulting partners to provide you with insight into where to start looking – and today’s blog will focus on one hot contender for the top spot – Freshworks .
Refresh
It’s been a pleasure to be invited again to Freshworks’ annual UK conference called Refresh and to experience the pace at which the Chennai vendor is capturing the market across all varieties of sectors, companies with 50 to well over 10,000 employees. The European market is one of the key contributors to their massive growth in recent years, resulting in an IPO in 2021 and the acquisition of Device42 in 2024.
In the keynote, Siddhartha Agarwal , SVP of Product Strategy & Operations, calls their addressable market “Fortune 5,000,000”, understanding that whilst Gartner ’s ITSM Magic Quadrant leader ServiceNow is focusing on Fortune 500+, their efforts are best spent providing access to near-out-of-the-box, easily configured, integrated, quickly implemented solutions that offer a sensible amount of configurability, support for enterprise workflows, and feature AI to drive productivity. Siddhartha promises uncomplicated AI and innovation at scale (true SaaS – no need to upgrade twice a year – yay!) on a trusted and secure platform.
Platform
The key pillars in the Freshworks portfolio are Employee Experience [Freshservice (ITSM) + Device42 (ITAM)] and Customer Experience [Freshdesk (CS), Freshworks CSS, Freshchat, Freshmarketer and Freshsales (CRM)]. These are built on the Freshworks Neo platform that natively includes AI Self-Service, AI Copilot and AI Insights colloquially named “Freddy". And it works in 40+ languages. Processing 1.2 million calls and 100 million tickets a day, it enabled them to train their own LLM and create 70 AI-powered use cases for their customers.
You can expect features such as ticket summaries, helping with agents’ tone of writing, next best action suggestions, multilingual translations, creation of knowledge articles, auto-reply generators, automated code generation from conversations or automated code review and publishing. The last one entering the world of DevOps, looking to take more of Atlassian’s JiraSM market share by increasing Freshworks' existing customer base of more than 16,000.
Siddhartha showcased multiple features and capabilities on stage in prepared mini demos, supported by multiple case studies from Taylormade , British Medical Association , Hays , the 英国斯特拉斯克莱德大学 , or Watersons. Some of the value highlights their customers see already are:
·???????? 50% decrease in average MTTR
·???????? 109% automation of core workflows
·???????? Streamlined onboarding between HR and IT
·???????? Employee experience unification within MS teams
·???????? Automatic ticket assignment and ticket deflection
·???????? 30% of queries handled by AI bots
·???????? 30x increased ticketing capacity with AI agents
·???????? 300% faster responses to customers with Copilot
Indeed, many of these result from switching from an out-of-date, underdeveloped platform to a modern SaaS ESM, accompanied by a process and culture change. However, it gives you an idea of what to aim for when considering a platform update. Most importantly, such results stemming from automation and AI are now available for significantly smaller businesses than three years ago - a true game-changer for the mid-market.
With the view to significantly increase the maturity of their ITOM and ITAM offerings, Freshworks spent $230m on the acquisition of Device42. It complements the portfolio with features such as:
It can also support your change management at scale through dependency mapping, and helping deduplicate any assets picked up by multiple discovery solutions. Already API-integrated with all major ITSM solutions, I suspect it is about to go through a platform “reFresh" (excuse the pun), bringing additional benefits from being on the same platform as its new parent company. Whist adopting Device42 may not be the answer to life, universe, everything, it certainly is a solution worth adding to your list at when considering maturing your operations and asset management.
Summary
Before the final refreshment hour, 毕博 closed the show with his “Keys to the AI Castle” talk, pointing out that goal of AI adoption is to learn, prove value, not a return on investment and that AI is not taking your job but the people who use AI will.
At CDW UK , we support many businesses running on Freshworks. Whilst the platform is not as customisable and configurable as the large enterprise solutions (think ServiceNow, BMC, or even Ivanti). Although Freshworks customers' adoption of its AI features and MS Teams integration is only starting (upgrade to Enterprise licensing being the key bottleneck), they are generally enjoying the platform and not looking to move away from it. That is a great testament to Freshworks' investment over the years. Unlike its large enterprise competitors, with the platform being true SaaS, having straightforward licensing, and OOTB features, you can expect a faster route to adopting AI within months, if not weeks, providing you with a strong case for tapping into the company’s AI budget, unlocking the keys to the AI Castle.
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