Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

When Ashwin Ballal was first asked to become a CIO, he wondered what he’d done wrong. Six months later, he called it the best job he’d ever had. Now CIO of Freshworks, Ashwin brings an unconventional perspective to IT leadership, shaped by a career spanning engineering, product, marketing, and operations.

Support inboxes aren't just filled with customer requests. They're also flooded with spam, promotional emails, automated notifications, and other non-support conversations that distract agents from customers who actually need help. Freshdesk's Email AI Agent clears that noise out on its own, auto-closing the spam and non-support stuff, and flagging anything it's unsure about for a human to check. Your team gets to focus on the customers who actually need them.

Automate high-volume customer service emails with Freshdesk's AI agent that resolves repetitive queries, maintains context across follow-ups, and escalates only when human intervention is needed. See Freshdesk's Email AI Agent in action. What is an AI agent in customer service? An AI agent is software that independently understands customer queries, retrieves answers from a knowledge base, and responds conversationally, without needing a human agent for every interaction.

AI doesn't fail because of the technology. It fails because organizations underestimate the debt hiding beneath their processes. As Agentic AI, Copilots, and intelligent automation become mainstream, many organizations discover that poor data, inconsistent processes, and outdated knowledge prevent AI from delivering value. In this video, we explore what it takes to become AI ready. Key takeaways: Business First IT requires AI that amplifies people, removes complexity, and drives measurable business value.