In the event you’ve ever been locked out of your work laptop, you recognize the pressing want to achieve IT help. Sadly, assist desk workers are sometimes busy aiding others, which might imply a big delay earlier than you regain entry.
Andrei Serban realized the essential significance of IT’s handbook work when he was a product lead on Rippling’s apps and integrations staff. Serban, who joined Rippling after it acquired his coding safety startup Fuzzbuzz in 2023, noticed a chance to automate most of the assist desk’s fundamental duties with AI, from resetting passwords, to granting entry to apps like Figma and Miro, to routine troubleshooting.
Serban couldn’t wait to get began on his imaginative and prescient. He left Rippling final 12 months to discovered Console, a startup on a mission to assist IT groups cut back mundane, repetitive duties, thereby releasing up time for assist desk professionals to work on extra strategic and complicated tasks.
Whereas making an attempt to automate assist desk features isn’t new, Console differentiates itself from present rivals — together with Moveworks, which was acquired by ServiceNow in March for $2.85 billion — by forgoing lengthy, complicated set up processes. Due to its simple integration with Slack, Console’s AI assistant will be made obtainable to everybody within the firm in just some weeks.
“We’re capable of get there so quick as a result of we don’t require you to interchange your assist desk,” he mentioned.
Console sees itself as an AI co-worker that up-levels present assist desk professionals. Serban even instructed that as firms digitize extra of their operations, the IT perform will grow to be more and more important.
Staff message Console on Slack and the startup’s AI agent shortly responds to requests as a result of it is aware of every little thing concerning the person, from their particular laptop computer mannequin to the purposes they’ve permission to make use of. Console’s AI can resolve over 50% of the duties by itself, and it’ll loop in somebody from IT for extra complicated points, Serban mentioned.
The quick set up time attracted clients, together with Scale AI, Flock Security, and Calendly.
These buyer wins have led Console to safe $6.2 million in seed funding from Thrive Capital.
Vince Hankes, a associate at Thrive, mentioned that the agency, which has backed most of the main AI firms, together with OpenAI, Cursor, and Scale AI, has had a thesis about synthetic intelligence’s potential to help with IT duties since ChatGPT was first launched within the fall of 2022.
Whereas Hankes acknowledged that Console’s quick integration would possibly make it appear simply replaceable, he believes its AI expertise will enhance so shortly with person adoption that it’ll grow to be an indispensable, deeply built-in system important to everybody on the buyer’s firm.
Console’s objective is to ultimately begin supporting different features, together with answering worker requests about HR, finance, and authorized.
“We wish Console to be an worker’s first name for assist,” Serban mentioned.
