Alongside is the wrong place
A separate chat product that doesn’t create tickets produces conversations invisible to your reporting, your SLAs and your team. Two systems of record for one queue is a data problem you will regret.
Everything becomes a ticket
Even fully automated resolutions should leave a record in the helpdesk, so volume, response times and repeat contacts remain measurable in one place — which is what makes resolution confirmed downstream possible at all.
If the AI’s conversations aren’t in your ticketing system, your reporting is now fiction.
Start where the helpdesk is weakest
Tagging and routing is usually manual, inconsistent, and immediately improvable — the safest first job and one your existing reporting can verify.
Your ticket history is the training material
Past resolved tickets contain real questions and answers your business stood behind. Filter for outcome before using them, or you teach it your average rather than your standard — as with any grounding corpus.
Escalation is an assignment, not a message
Hand-off should reassign the ticket with full context attached, so nobody asks the customer to repeat themselves — the difference between a good escalation and a lost customer.
Watch what it does to your metrics
Automated first responses make response times look dramatically better while resolution may not have moved. Flag automated actions so you can still read the numbers honestly.