Thoughtworks transforms employee service with AI

Thoughtworks helps some of the world’s largest organizations harness AI to transform their businesses. When the global technology consultancy decided to reinvent its own employee service experience, it applied that same AI-first mindset internally.

Today, Thoughtworks’ AI-powered employee service agent, Buddy, built on Zendesk AI has addressed over 7,800 inquiries from more than 2,800 individual team members. Maintaining roughly 79 percent accuracy, it successfully prevents routine Q&A tickets from cluttering queues, enabling employees to receive swift support while freeing IT personnel to concentrate on strategic initiatives.

“As a consulting company, our talent is super important for the business,” says Jessie Jie Xia, CIO at Thoughtworks. “And if we can provide the right tools and services to our employees, it will help them deliver the best services to our clients.”

Improving employee service isn’t just about making IT more efficient. It’s about helping more than 10,000 Thoughtworks’ employees across 20 countries spend less time dealing with technology issues and more time serving clients.

“We want to ensure we provide best-in-class services,” says Banu Pavithra Varagamurthy, Director and Head of Digital Application Management & Operations (DAMO) for Global IT Services at Thoughtworks. “Employee satisfaction is one of our most important metrics.”

From ticketing platform to AI-powered employee service

Thoughtworks has partnered with Zendesk for employee service for more than 15 years. After upgrading to Zendesk Enterprise in late 2025, the company expanded beyond ticketing, help center, and reporting to adopt AI capabilities that could transform how employees receive support.

“We did very detailed research around the type of services and support we offer,” Banu says.

The analysis revealed that roughly one-quarter of IT requests were simple questions that required a human agent to answer.

“We thought that answering those repetitive questions was probably not the best use of our human agents’ time,” Banu says.

Using Zendesk AI, Thoughtworks built Buddy, an AI-powered employee service agent that answers many employee questions instantly while freeing IT specialists to focus on more complex requests.

“With Buddy, it’s much easier for us to recognize who employees are and where they’re located, allowing the AI agent to provide region-specific answers,” Banu says. “That is one of the important features that I’ve really enjoyed from Zendesk AI.”

Building better employee service from the inside out

For Jessie, the value of the platform goes beyond the metrics—it’s something she’s experienced firsthand. She regularly spends time with the support team to better understand the employee experience.

“Once in a while, I’ll go to the team and do some hands-on work,” she says. “I spent a few days with the maintenance support team solving tickets. It’s very easy to work with Zendesk. We can fetch the right information quickly and close tickets much faster.”

For Thoughtworks, success isn’t measured by automation alone. The company also tracks ticket deflection, resolution time, employee satisfaction, operational efficiency, and long-term service quality.

To evaluate Buddy’s performance, Thoughtworks monitors metrics around question resolution, platform adoption, and user engagement. Since launching in mid-May, Buddy has interacted with more than 2,800 Thoughtworkers and processed over 7,800 queries, achieving a 79 percent successful resolution rate via AI-driven self-service. These combined insights offer Thoughtworks a comprehensive picture of Buddy’s influence—demonstrating how it lessens the workload on service personnel while delivering quick, convenient assistance to employees.

Building the foundation for AI at scale

Instead of rolling Buddy out globally overnight, Thoughtworks started with regional pilots before expanding to additional teams and geographies. The phased approach allowed the company to validate results while strengthening the knowledge base that powers every AI interaction.

“The knowledge base and context are super important,” Jessie says. “If you don’t have really good knowledge, autonomous service doesn’t get very far—and it can provide poor service.”

As AI takes over repetitive work, Thoughtworks’ service teams are spending less time on manual tasks and more time innovating, improving processes, and shaping the future of employee service.

Building employee service around a single platform

Today, Zendesk supports employee service across multiple global functions at Thoughtworks. In addition to Global IT Services, Human Resources, Information Security, Workplace Experience, Recruiting, and Finance all use Zendesk to manage internal support.

The company also completed a major consolidation effort, migrating 14 separate Zendesk instances into one global environment with support from Zendesk’s Customer Success and technical teams.

“We always had support from the Zendesk team,” Banu says. “They consider my KPIs as their KPIs. That makes it very easy to share my goals because they treat them as their own.”

Expanding AI usage now and in the future

While Buddy is already transforming employee service, Thoughtworks believes AI’s future extends well beyond answering questions.

“We’re looking beyond the ticketing system,” Jessie says. “The problem should disappear before it even gets reported.”

For Banu, the next opportunity is using AI to help leaders spend less time analyzing reports and more time improving service.

“I spend time looking at which products generate the most tickets and where resolution times are dropping,” she says. “Analyst Copilot is going to be super helpful because it will provide those insights automatically.”

As Thoughtworks continues expanding its use of AI, the goal remains the same: remove friction for employees so they can focus on delivering exceptional work for clients.

“AI is going to help us make things more efficient,” Banu says. “And we’ll have our human agents engage in things where it really matters.”