Introducing Deskpro Private: It’s time to democratize access to AI for customer and employee service

Deskpro has built and perfected a simple way to deploy and manage our help desk platform in private environments, and today I am excited to announce support for any large language model (LLM) in those environments. This opens up the potential to realize measurable Return On Investment (ROI) for the tens of thousands of organizations that have been unable to use AI in their customer and employee service operations due to security, compliance, data sovereignty, and data privacy restrictions.

Let’s unpack this.

Does AI really deliver measurable ROI?

Despite the excitement of Silicon Valley and Wall Street over anything related to AI, there has been a healthy dose of skepticism in business and government about whether investing in AI is actually worth it, and adoption definitely lags. Having said that, customer and employee service is more or less the canonical example used to show that AI can indeed deliver real value.

At Deskpro, we have seen the evidence for ourselves. We introduced AI into Deskpro Cloud more than a year ago, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. There are three significant areas where we are using AI:

• AI Agent Assist – enabling human agents to be more productive with AI helping to draft and enhance replies, summarize tickets, create knowledge base articles, etc.
• AI Chatbot – encouraging self-service with curated access to relevant customer and employee data, reducing the load on human agents where possible
• Workflow automations – taking advantage of LLM’s strong abilities for sentiment analysis, intent detection, and language recognition to appropriately route tickets the first time

Each of these can provide value in terms of productivity on their own. Put them together, and the benefits are compelling.

The AI adoption gap

However, none of these capabilities are being used by any of our customers with strict security, compliance, or data sovereignty concerns. And it’s certainly not just our customers who have been unable to adopt AI. We recently conducted the industry survey, State of AI in Support Operations: Balancing Innovation and Compliance, which we are publishing today. Many of the results support exactly what we are seeing from our customers:

• 92% of technology companies are adopting AI for support operations, compared to just 58% in regulated industries
• 71% of support leaders in regulated industries cite compliance as the primary reason they can’t deploy AI solutions today
• 64% of respondents in regulated sectors said they would only deploy AI if they could retain full control over their data and infrastructure

It is no secret that businesses and governments care deeply about their data. This is, after all, why the cybersecurity industry is conservatively forecast to surpass $300 billion in annual spend in 2025. Organizations that genuinely care about their data need to know that they are in control of where their data is being processed. The adoption gap that is clear from the survey comes because the LLMs used by help desk platforms today are accessed via the public cloud, with unencrypted data. It is no wonder that Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Privacy Officers (CPOs) have limited the use of AI features in their help desk platforms. They simply didn’t have a choice.

Until now.

Introducing Deskpro Private

Deskpro Private allows the deployment of our help desk platform into any private environment, including Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs), sovereign clouds, enterprise data centers (a.k.a. on-premise), and even air-gapped environments for the most extreme security use cases.

While Deskpro has had the ability to deploy privately for a number of years, Deskpro Private now introduces the capability to support the use of any commercial, custom, or private LLM in the private environment. Some examples:

• Deploy Deskpro Private into an AWS VPC and use AWS PrivateLink to send encrypted data to Amazon Bedrock, unlocking all of the AI foundation models supported there
• Deploy Deskpro Private into a sovereign cloud service based in a specific country or region, and leverage any foundation model available
• Deploy Deskpro Private in your own data center and use your own internal commercial or custom LLM

We are just getting started…

This is just the beginning of our mission to make AI-powered customer and employee service a reality for any business or government use case. For example, we are currently working on embedding significant AI safety and security controls into Deskpro. Stay tuned for more details on that coming soon.

If your organization has challenges in adopting AI for customer or employee service because of security, compliance, data sovereignty or data privacy, Deskpro is here for you. As am I. You can reach me anytime at brad.murdoch@deskpro.com. I look forward to speaking with you.