For Sterling Parker, Executive Vice President of Global Support at Ivanti, customer support has never been a static function. Over his nearly 14-year journey with the company — starting from taking support calls on the front lines to now overseeing a global operation — he told me in our interview about witnessing firsthand how technology can transform not just how support is delivered, but also how teams think, collaborate, and innovate. Today, generative AI is at the heart of that transformation.
Ivanti’s journey with AI in customer support didn’t begin with the Gen AI boom of late 2022. The company started weaving machine learning into its support infrastructure as early as 2018. The initial goal was straightforward: automate low-effort, repetitive support tasks to improve the self-service experience and free up human agents to focus on higher-value interactions. This early integration used machine learning to analyze a customer’s behavior just before submitting a support case — where they’d been, what documentation they had already accessed, what entitlements they had — and then recommended related support articles. This modest beginning already produced measurable impact, deflecting up to 12% of incoming support requests.