Artificial intelligence is now the loudest phrase in enterprise software. But AI customer service and employee experience tools might just be the more important ones — because if AI can’t make getting help faster and easier, what is it really for?

Look no further than recent data to understand that change in perspective. Freshworks Inc., a provider of customer and employee service software, reported a 15% year-on-year revenue increase to just over $215 million in its latest third-quarter results. This rise can be attributed to rapid growth in demand for AI-powered service solutions, according to Dennis Woodside (pictured), chief executive officer and president of Freshworks. Enterprise customers are now integrating AI into daily operations, looking for concrete gains in response and satisfaction scores — but underneath the number crunching is a more human ambition: to redesign what service work actually feels like.

“Our customers want their employees who are in service roles to be doing higher value work,” Woodside told theCUBE. “They don’t want them answering the same question or taking the same actions. ‘How do I return my order? How do I reset my password?’ That’s not interesting work for the agent. It’s actions that the AI naturally can take on their behalf and actually get to better results for the customer.”

Woodside spoke with theCUBE’s Bob Laliberte at the Refresh North America 2025 event, for an exclusive interview on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the explosion of AI customer service and employee service tools, strategic partnerships in information technology and how Freshworks is positioning itself as a leader in the software-as-a-service market. (* Disclosure below.) 

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Dennis Woodside:

Check out three insights you may have missed during theCUBE’s coverage of the Refresh North America 2025 event:

Insight #1: AI customer service and employee support tools must be integrated, not added as an afterthought.

The way Freshworks builds product is an acknowledgement that its offerings — whether in AI customer service or AI-powered employee support — only really deliver when they’re integrated with existing workflows. Freshservice and Freshdesk address employee and customer experience respectively, and above them sits a single AI layer that serves three personas — end users via Freddy AI agents for self-service, human agents via Freddy Copilot and leaders via Freddy Insights — all designed to be part of the tools support teams already use every day, according to Srini Raghavan, chief product officer of Freshworks. The company is deliberately targeting customers migrating from heavyweight platforms who need something powerful yet easier to live with.

“In a lot of instances, [customers are] coming from complex platforms,” Raghavan told theCUBE. “These customers come to us because they get value much faster — and you don’t need to have a developer maintaining these platforms. They can maintain it by themselves and the users have easier access.”

That focus on embedded AI customer service is ultimately judged not by product diagrams, but by what customers do with it. Leaders such as those at Stack Overflow are explicit that they have no appetite for switching IT service management platforms again; instead, they wanted a system that could grow with the company while staying simple to run, according to Moosh Jarzyna, director of IT at Stack Overflow. Moving onboarding into Freshservice and automating the handoffs between IT and people operations transformed a painful process into a reliable one, with on-time laptop delivery climbing exponentially, Jarzyna explained. But the real shift he cares about is how that foundation can finally help IT move from reacting to issues to getting ahead of them.

“One … adage keeps coming up and that is, ‘We need to go from being reactive to being proactive,’” he said. “Putting everything onto one platform is finally going to open up the capacity within IT organizations to bridge that gap and finally move to a proactive state.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Srini Raghavan and Moosh Jarzyna:

Insight #2: Sophisticated operations demand straightforward platforms.

Few environments are as unforgiving as a global sports manufacturer trying to meet modern expectations while relying on legacy systems. For TaylorMade Golf Comany Inc., the move away from an on-premises, services-heavy system to Freshservice let its internal teams modernise quickly, survive the pandemic shift to remote work and design new workflows live with application owners in the room. Their internal Freddy AI customer service assistant, which TaylorMade employees recognize as “Caddy”, has become the front door for everyday support — a single place where employees can ask questions rather than queuing at the service desk, according to Ali Chitsaz, associate director of global ITSM and digital workspace at TaylorMade.

“People can go to Caddy and ask whatever question they want and either get service requests or access to knowledge,” he explained. “It helps deflect basic tier one questions from our service desk to an area and also keeps people from having to walk down to the service desk or try to jump in front of a line … It’s been hugely impactful.”

Technology estates keep accumulating complexity and point solutions, but the organisations Freshworks works with still expect enterprise-grade outcomes on mid-market headcount, according to Jason Aloia, vice president of product management at Freshworks. Freshservice is pitched as a way to reconcile those demands: a unified, enterprise-ready IT platform that can support use cases such as  TaylorMade’s global service workflows without a seven-figure consulting bill attached.

“It’s the nature of technology that it grows in complexity and there’s usually more and more point solutions that come into an ecosystem over time,” Aloia said. “The way we like to think of it as delivering a fully enterprise-grade platform for IT, unified with all of the capabilities you would expect, but keeping that ethos of an uncomplicated, quick time to value that doesn’t require an army of consultants. You can get it up and running with yourself or your modest team.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Ali Chitsaz and Jason Aloia:

Insight #3: People-first AI turns support teams into performance engines.

Nowhere is the connection between support and performance more literal than in Formula One. For McLaren Racing Ltd., business technology is not a support function but a competitive asset. Tools need to keep a staff of 1,400 people aligned over a 24-race season — a team that needs its IT to be as fast as the car itself, according to Dan Keyworth, director of business technology at McLaren Racing. 

“We say that if you win the first race in Bahrain and you do nothing to your car, you actually come last at the end of the season,” Keyworth told theCUBE. “That is the relentless innovation and there is a level of gut and intuition that goes into this sport, but data is absolutely everything.”

To sustain that level of innovation, McLaren has re-engineered how it manages incidents and reliability across race operations. Six sets of garages are built and torn down around the world, with 150 people on the road at any given time. Underneath, Freshworks provides a common workflow for software and IT teams, whether they are trackside or back at the factory, so that every issue enters through a single channel and is contained before it ever touches the car, according to Keyworth. AI adds another “opinion,” another “voice in the room,” offering probabilities about what’s happening and what decision to make, while keeping the human in the loop.

“We’re trying to move at such a pace that we need services to feel almost frictionless for people across the organization,” Keyworth said. “The strap line this week is ‘uncomplicate,’ and Freshservice really has done that for us, including how quickly we were able to get up and running as a customer.”

Here’s theCUBE’s complete video interview with Dan Keyworth:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of Refresh North America 2025, here’s our complete video playlist:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Refresh North America 2025 event. Neither Freshworks, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE