Artificial intelligence is transforming information technology service operations, pushing organizations to consolidate their data and take advantage of new AI tools.

Freshworks Inc. has capitalized on that shift, expanding its customer base to include mid-sized organizations such as Seagate Technology Holdings PLC and New Balance Athletics Inc. The goal, according to Dennis Woodside (pictured, right), chief executive officer of Freshworks, is to gather their data into one reliable, enterprise-grade system of record so that they can compete against larger enterprises.

“We are offering our customers — that agile enterprise — a choice that they might not have had 18 months ago, 24 months ago,” said Woodside. “We’ve got customers that are large organizations that have made the choice to bet their business with us, that are transforming their service operations with us, and we’re ready for you — so come on in.”

Woodside spoke with theCUBE’s Bob Laliberte (left) at the Freshworks Refresh event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. At the event, Laliberte interviewed Freshworks leaders and customers about how AI is shifting the metrics of productivity and Freshwork’s growing momentum in the service operations space. (* Disclosure below.)

Here are three key insights you may have missed from Freshworks Refresh 2026:

Insight #1: AI is changing how organizations measure productivity.

Traditional response-time metrics were based on how fast an employee responded to service operations requests but now that AI can respond to tasks immediately, a new way of analyzing productivity is required. Freshworks has developed a new experience level agreement analytics layer, XLA, that measures whether or not AI is actually making employees more efficient, Woodside emphasized.

“When every response can be instantaneous because it’s AI-driven, what you really want to measure is, ‘Did the response make the employee more productive?’” he said. “You can do that by asking the employee, but you can also do that by watching what they do next and understanding that — that’s an agentic way of creating what we call an XLA score.”

Freshworks’ new tools are intended to support IT workers by giving them room to solve higher-level tasks, instead of being buried in tickets. This approach has paid real dividends — Seagate migrated onto Freshservice from a competitor platform in just three months. In the future, Woodside imagines that IT teams will govern thousands of agents from different vendors, all on Freshworks’ consolidated platform, Woodside pointed out.

“I’ve never met an IT team that doesn’t have a list of projects that’s much larger than their actual capacity,” he said. “The people who are answering questions today from employees — they are very skilled. They understand your systems, they understand your culture, they understand your business. Typically, what I’ve seen our customers do when they have an agent where they’re freeing up that time, they can find much more important work for them to do, much more creative work.”

Here is the complete video interview with Dennis Woodside:

Insight #2: AI adoption is not one size fits all

The push for organizations to integrate AI into their service operations has been so intense, that many are forgetting to create a long-term strategy. If IT teams don’t establish metrics for how to measure AI productivity first, then they may find it difficult to prove that AI is worth the investment, according to Julie Mohr, principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

“The danger is that you just start implementing AI across the organization without intent,” she said. “You want to have a purposeful way to replace the repetitive work that’s happening within organizations in a way that provides value, but also manages the cost associated with these technologies.”

Freshworks has introduced a new set of capabilities designed to help customers with just that. Freddy AI Agent Studio is a no-code environment that enables users to build custom agentic AI applications or deploy more than 20 prebuilt workflows inside the company’s proprietary platform. In addition, Freshworks released MCP Gateway, which lets customers use models such as Claude or ChatGPT within Freshservice’s platform.

When it comes to reimagining IT service operations, customers may need more time to reassess core processes. Other workflows, however, can be updated quickly and refined through repeated iteration, explained Kady Srinivasan, chief marketing officer of Freshworks.

“You’ve got to be able to operate at two different speeds,” she said. “At the same time, there needs to be a fast agile speedboat type of a speed where you’re learning quickly, you’re trying things, because the only way, sometimes, you can do things or learn things is actually by practicing it in the wild.”

Here is the complete video interview with Julie Mohr and Kady Srinivasan:

Insight #3: Service operations need interoperable AI tools

With shadow AI plaguing the enterprise world, it’s clear that companies need a secure way to manage a range of AI tools. Even though customers might take different approaches to AI implementation, Freshworks wants to guarantee that the AI tools are one, interoperable, and two, governed, noted Murali Swaminathan, chief technology officer of Freshworks.

“There’s a lot of change that has happened in the AI world,” he said.  “There’s so much proliferation of AI-native tools [and] third-party products. Everybody is doing AI in a different way. There’s no one-size-fits-all — everything needs to connect together. We need to interoperate with other AI systems, and that’s the learning lesson here.”

Freshworks has built-in governance for every layer of the AI stack, allowing customers to maintain control even as traditional service operations gives way to more autonomous systems. Other safeguards in Freshworks’ platform include sovereignty policies and data anonymization, which ensures that personal data won’t leave its designated regions, according to Swaminathan.

“[You need] trust in how you set up the AI, how you set up the controls, how it performs, how you can trace what’s going on and then how we can report on what it did and what it did not do,” he said. “Trust is there in many layers, and that’s what we believe in building the product or providing the tools for you to set it up the right way.”

Here is the complete video interview with Murali Swaminathan:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of Freshworks Refresh 2026, here’s our complete event video playlist:

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE