Practical thoughts on IT support, customer success, automation, and building systems that work
Uber just became the first major tech company to explicitly name AI as the reason for cutting customer service staff. Two days earlier, OpenAI launched Presence, an enterprise support agent platform where human escalation is a first-class feature. Here is what both stories tell you.
KB rot is silent and expensive. Articles go stale, customers get wrong answers, deflection drops, and agents stop trusting the tool they are supposed to use. Here is the audit and maintenance routine that stops it.
OpenAI's most capable long-horizon model spent an hour bypassing its sandbox to post a GitHub PR it was told not to post. Here is the one lesson this containment incident holds for every support team deploying AI agents today.
Support agents are trained to help, and attackers know it. Here is the four-gate verification protocol I use before any account change, and how to hold the line without killing your CSAT.
Salesforce is acquiring Fin (formerly Intercom) for $3.6B. Agentforce Help Agent went GA with pay-per-resolution pricing. Zendesk shipped Forethought AI agents. Here is what support teams need to know and act on right now.
Most support escalations are informal dumps with no context. Here is the five-field framework that makes tier-2 agents immediately effective on the hardest tickets.
Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 is the world's largest open-weight model, rivaling Fable 5. OpenAI's GPT-Red slashed prompt injection rates 6x. Zendesk WFM is now free on Suite Pro. Here's what support teams need to act on.
CSAT tells you if the last conversation went well. Customer Effort Score tells you if the journey to get there was worth it. Here's why you need both, and how to set up CES in under an hour.
Every major AI lab just got a safety grade. Anthropic led with C+. What the trust gap and safety scores mean for support teams deploying AI agents in 2026.
Manual triage is the first thing that breaks when ticket volume climbs. Here are the exact Zendesk triggers and automations that handle routing and tagging, so your agents spend time on conversations instead of queue management.
Fable 5 is free until July 19, then token billing kicks in. OpenAI shipped Sol and ChatGPT Work. Zendesk added predictive routing. Here is what support teams need to act on this week.
Most support QA only tracks compliance. The teams that actually improve quality build QA for coaching too. Here's the rubric, sampling approach, and feedback process that makes the difference.
OpenAI shipped GPT-Live on July 8, a full-duplex voice model that listens and speaks at the same time. Customer support was the first use case named. Here is what that actually changes.
Anthropic's J-lens research makes Claude's internal reasoning readable in real time. Half of support teams already have AI agents live. Almost none can see what those agents are actually doing mid-ticket.
Repeat tickets are a hidden tax on every support team. Here is the n8n workflow I built to surface known resolutions instantly and flag knowledge-base gaps before they become a backlog.
Fable 5 moved to per-token billing today with no grace period. Meta put AI image generation in WhatsApp. n8n fixed a bug breaking AI workflows. Here's what support teams need to do.
By the time a frustrated customer submits a ticket, you've already lost ground. Here is the n8n workflow I built to catch at-risk customers before they get there.
Claude Sonnet 5 dropped June 30 with better agentic capability and lower introductory pricing. Here's how it changes the ticket triage, escalation, and response-drafting workflows I run in n8n.
AI tool sprawl is real and it hits IT and ops teams first. Here's the quarterly audit I run to cut cost, reduce risk, and keep my stack from becoming a liability.
Claude Fable 5 returned July 1 after 19 days of US export controls. Here is what the blackout exposed about AI-dependent support stacks, and what to do about it.
Manual new-hire provisioning fails the same way every time: someone forgets to send an email, or IT is busy, or the chain breaks. Here's the n8n + Microsoft Entra ID workflow that provisions accounts automatically before Day One.
Password resets are the most frequent IT ticket in almost every org. Here's how I automated 75% of them with n8n and Microsoft Entra ID, and what I'd do differently building it today.
Microsoft's Work IQ APIs went GA on June 16. I've been thinking about the IT support use case I want to build, and the cost question I haven't answered yet.
n8n's April 2026 MCP Server puts Claude directly inside your automation instance. Here's what that changes in daily IT ops work, and what it still doesn't.
A practical n8n workflow that fetches Pipedrive CRM data on every new Help Scout ticket and posts it as an internal note, so support agents see deal stage, owner, and last activity before they type a single word.
A real story about an AI automation that crossed two customers' contexts, and how n8n's new Human-in-the-Loop tool gates changed the way I build agents that touch anything outbound.
For every 100 enterprise AI agent pilots, 88 never reach production. Here's what's actually stopping them, and the four-question filter I apply before building anything.
Zendesk's outcome-based AI pricing auto-bills per resolved ticket since January 2026. Most support teams didn't notice until the invoice arrived. Here's the real math.
A practitioner's account of building an n8n + Claude API workflow that autonomously handles support ticket triage, before Gartner named it the hottest technology of 2026.
A practitioner's honest take on which IT certifications open real doors in 2026, which ones you can safely skip, and what employers actually look at.
OpenAI's $4 billion Deployment Company just landed 150 engineers ready to embed inside your organization. Here's what in-house IT ops and automation specialists need to understand about the shift.
ServiceNow's Autonomous Workforce claims to handle 90% of L1 IT requests. What it actually replaces, what it doesn't, and what to do if you're in IT support right now.
I run Claude and ChatGPT in parallel across customer support, automation, and IT ops. Here's where each one actually earns its keep, and where each one will let you down.
The best support teams in 2026 are winning by defaulting to async. Not because it's trendy, because the math finally works. Here's what changed and how to make the shift.
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft now hard-reject unauthenticated email. An IT specialist's plain-English guide to setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before it hits your helpdesk.
Most IT teams have an offboarding checklist. Most don't complete it consistently. Here's the n8n workflow that closes every access door automatically, and why the 30-minute build beats a multi-step manual process every time.
Vibe coding and AI code generation are creating a new wave of IT support tickets. Here's the pattern I'm seeing, and how support teams need to adapt.
I run both Zapier and n8n in production. Here's the real cost math, what each tool does better, and the three questions I ask before picking one.
Agentic AI is resolving support tickets autonomously, and sometimes wrong. Here's the governance layer, escalation logic, and confidence thresholds that separate a safe deployment from an expensive mess.
The unglamorous story behind climbing from ICT attaché to ICT Officer, the year of grunt work, the decisions that compounded, and what I'd undo.
The Microsoft 365 Copilot rebrand is a name change. The licensing confusion, new ticket types, and admin overhead it created are very real. Here's what IT support teams are actually dealing with.
Most CS grads fight for a small slice of the tech job market. The wider world of IT support, ops, automation, and CX pays well, hires faster, and compounds quickly.
A week-by-week guide to the first 100 days in a new IT, support, or ops role, who to meet, what to document, what to improve, and what to leave alone.
One small n8n workflow eliminated manual customer data entry, gave a support team back 12+ hours a week, and pushed efficiency up 35%. Here's the full build.
Lessons from rebuilding IT at a 300-person NGO across East Africa, policy before tools, Active Directory design, offline-first thinking, and field champions.
Five lessons from building a global tech career from Kenya, why certifications open doors a degree doesn't, what remote work actually demands, and why your geography is an asset.
FCR beats CSAT, NPS, and response time every time. Here's how to achieve 95% first-contact resolution and why every follow-up costs you customer trust.
After 5+ years and 1,000+ tickets, here are the customer support practices that consistently drive 95%+ first-contact resolution.
The support industry is obsessed with fast response times. But customers care 3x more about resolution quality than reply speed. Here's how to balance both.
Why internal playbooks, not knowledge bases, are what separate good support teams from great ones. A practical guide to building, structuring, and maintaining them.
A real-world walkthrough of the n8n automations I built to handle ticket routing, AI-drafted responses, and escalation detection.
Why support shouldn't be siloed in one department, and how to build a culture where everyone owns the customer experience.
From supporting 200+ staff at a Kenyan NGO to building AI-powered workflows for US SaaS companies, how IT bridges gaps and transforms lives.
Most support tickets shouldn't exist. Here's how better systems, feedback loops, and a prevention-first culture can eliminate 90% of recurring issues.
Most CRMs are glorified address books. Here's how to turn Pipedrive and GoHighLevel into automation engines that close deals, nurture leads, and forecast revenue.
Most cold outreach fails because of bad targeting, weak copy, and poor deliverability. Here's the full stack I use, Clay, Apollo, Instantly.ai, Pipedrive, and the exact framework that increased pipeline by 40%.
A practical look at AI in customer support, what actually works today, what fails, and the 'AI drafts, human sends' model that balances automation with quality.
Lessons from supporting 30+ branches across East Africa, the infrastructure decisions, remote support strategies, and people-first approach that made it work.