London South Bank University (LSBU) is one of the oldest vocational universities in London. “We’re actually more than just a university,” Andrew Crawford says. “We’re a group that also includes colleges, sixth-form academies and a technical college.” Practical education is central to the organization, from nursing and engineering to construction, business and IT.

Andrew is a Senior Service Management Analyst in the university’s IT department. As he puts it, he works “in customer service, on the non-techie side of the department”. He handles IT communications, writes content for internal sites and manages the TOPdesk platform.

Across LSBU, different departments use TOPdesk for a variety of purposes. The IT department is the largest user of TOPdesk, with around 50 of the organization’s 120 operators working in IT. The platform plays a central role in the service desk’s day-to-day work, handling incidents and service requests from internal teams and external partners. “Generally speaking, it’s incidents and service requests throughout the day.”

Operators regularly deal with long, detailed tickets. When incidents are passed from one colleague to another, it can take time to understand what has happened.

“You really never know until you dig into the ticket what the exact issue is about,” Andrew says. The end user explains the problem from their own perspective, there may have been several conversations back and forth, and sometimes a resolution has already been tried. “You’d have to go through the entire ticket to work out the next step.”

Creating knowledge items from incidents could also take time. When information from a ticket was copied into a knowledge item, it often included case-specific details. As a result, the content had to be rewritten before it could be reused.

“I never really enjoyed creating knowledge items – it always felt a bit clunky,” Andrew says. “Often you ended up having to write them from scratch.”

The AI Knowledge Item Generation feature in TOPdesk changes that process. Instead of copying ticket text, it turns incident information into reusable knowledge in just a few clicks.

“Using AI to generate a knowledge item is so fast, you don’t even have to think about it,” Andrew says. “It’s very easy, very quick, very clear. Both the quantity and quality of knowledge items have improved.”

Another AI feature addresses the challenge of long tickets. AI Incident Summarization helps operators quickly grasp the situation by generating a concise summary of the issue, what’s already been tried, and the current status.

“You can ensure that whoever picks up a ticket quickly sees what it’s about without having to read through the whole story. That’s exactly where I immediately saw the potential value of AI.”

London South Bank University started using the AI features as part of a beta programme. The team spent about two weeks experimenting with the tools to see how they could support the service desk.

Once testing ended, the features were enabled in production. “It was so easy that I can’t even remember how I did it,” Andrew says. “It was just the flick of a button.”

For LSBU, the biggest impact of the AI features is the time saved in day-to-day work. By taking over repetitive, formulaic tasks, AI frees up time for operators to focus on improving the service desk and makes the work more enjoyable.

“The words and instructions – that’s the boring bit. It gives you time to look at the information with a fresh pair of eyes and be more creative.”

For Andrew personally, it also creates space to think about how the team uses TOPdesk and how the platform can support the service desk even better.

Service desk tickets often contain sensitive information: personal details, internal processes and security incidents. For IT teams, that raises a lot of questions and uncertainty: what happens to that data when AI is involved?

Andrew and his team had the same concern. “We were very mindful of what TOPdesk would do with our data. We are very committed to security at LSBU,” he says.

Those concerns were addressed quickly. TOPdesk processes data on local servers and does not use customer data to train its models. The team was also transparent about how the system works and where the data is processed.

“TOPdesk were very clear about how the data was going to be used and where it was going.”

His advice is simple: if you are already using structured service management tools, AI is a logical next step. “If you’re using this type of tool and you’re not using AI, I don’t understand why. It’s a no-brainer.”