Front Desk and Help Desk Are Now Manned by AI

The corporate front desk and the internal help desk are becoming faster, smarter and always on. New data from RingCentral and ServiceNow shows AI systems handling inbound calls and resolving IT tickets at scale.

AI’s New Front Desk

One significant example of artificial intelligence moving into the customer experience layer is the rapid adoption of AI Receptionist technology from RingCentral.

In its fourth-quarter 2025 earnings, the company reported that its AI Receptionist (AIR) now serves more than 8,300 customers, up 44% from the prior quarter, signaling strong demand from businesses of all sizes seeking to automate basic customer inquiries, call handling, scheduling and routing without human staff.

RingCentral’s broader AI suite, encompassing pre-call reception (AIR), live agent assistance (AVA) and post-interaction analysis (ACE), reflects how digital labor is being embedded across customer experience touchpoints. Early adopters such as healthcare providers report significant operational gains: patient call wait times and inefficient routing issues were mitigated after deploying AIR, while quality management analytics replaced manual review processes.

But the push toward AI augmentation does not stop at the front door of customer engagement. Providers of enterprise workflow platforms are now redefining what AI can do behind the scenes.

Research from PYMNTS Intelligence found that roughly 60% of consumers now use voice assistants. As voice moves from novelty to norm in households and on smartphones, expectations are rising for businesses to offer similarly seamless, real-time responses over the phone.

From Assisting to Autonomous Work

ServiceNow’s recent rollout of its Autonomous Workforce, alongside the EmployeeWorks interface, represents a leap toward embedding AI directly into organizational workflows.

Rather than simply recommending actions or assisting humans with tasks, these AI specialists are designed to execute entire jobs from diagnosing and resolving common IT support tickets to completing HR or procurement requests with built-in governance, context awareness and role-based permissions.

According to ServiceNow, its Autonomous Workforce currently resolves more than 90% of its internal Level 1 IT issues autonomously, and does so up to 99% faster than before. EmployeeWorks, powered in part by the Moveworks conversational AI platform acquired by ServiceNow, provides an AI “front door” for employees, enabling natural-language requests to be turned into completed actions across systems, with audit trails and compliance built in.

Opportunity and Risk

This broad sweep of AI adoption, from customer-facing reception agents to internal autonomous workers promises clear economic benefits: faster service delivery, reductions in routine labor and potential reallocation of human talent toward strategic work. But it also underscores mounting challenges in governance, security and workforce transformation.

Security teams are warning of the risks arising from AI proliferation inside enterprises. As artificial intelligence agents and systems proliferate, they expand the “non-human identity” surface that must be protected and managed.

Studies have found that non-human identities, which include AI agents, service accounts, API keys and automation credentials, now outnumber human identities by vast margins, with reported ratios ranging from about 50:1 to as high as 82:1 in modern enterprise environments as automation scales.

Security professionals are sounding the alarm: in another survey, 69% said vulnerabilities in AI agents and autonomous systems pose a greater security threat than misuse by humans, and 86% agreed that AI agents cannot be fully trusted without unique, dynamic digital identities, a foundational capability many organizations still lack.

This explosion of machine identities expands the attack surface dramatically, creating invisible points of access that traditional identity and access management models are ill-equipped to govern, while attackers exploit these weak spots through techniques like credential theft and prompt manipulation at machine speed.