A better way to connect people to the help they need

Phil Christianson has been in product management for over 20 years. He's used every ITSM system you can name. He knows the drill — the dropdown menus, the service catalogs, the "select your issue type" trees that never quite fit the problem you're actually having.

Today, as Chief Product Officer at Xurrent, he's responsible for the product roadmap, strategy, and — yes — actually using the platform his team builds.

One area of the platform he's really leaned into? Sera AI.

"I only use the virtual agent now," Phil says. "I've stopped entering tickets the old way."

If a CPO with two decades of experience has abandoned the "traditional approach," maybe there's something worth paying attention to.

This is the second post in our "How Xurtains Use Xurrent" series, where we pull back the curtain on how our own teams use the platform every day. (If it doesn't work for us, why would it work for you?)

In the first article, we looked at how teams across HR, IT, Finance, and more collaborate without silos. This time, we're looking at what happens when AI gets woven into that platform — not as a bolted-on feature, but as a fabric that runs through everything.

The old way

Phil describes "the old way" brilliantly when he says, "The old way you'd come into a ticketing system — you go to some sort of web page, you'd say 'I have a problem with my computer,' it would say 'do you mean this laptop?' and usually it was like three laptops ago."

We see this across many traditional service portals, which often have outdated asset information. The data is stale, the experience is frustrating, and it makes you feel like the system doesn't actually know you.

But that's not the only outdated experience many ITSM users experience. A few others include:

Never-ending service portal drop-down menus. Before reporting an issue, the system requires users to navigate a "tree of options" — Hardware or software? Desktop or laptop? Is this a request or an incident? The system forces you into predefined buckets that often don't match your actual situation.

Phil described it this way: "You'd select from a catalog — is it hardware, software, are you trying to move offices — and you sort of walk through this tree."

The "I don't know where this should go" problem — do I submit to IT? Facilities? HR? End users aren't expected to know the org chart. But traditional portals force them to guess: Is this an IT thing? A facilities thing? Should I submit to HR? If you pick the wrong one, it either gets bounced around or sits in the wrong queue for days.

As John Davis, Xurrent's Director of Business Operations, shared: "[From the end-user side], customers who come to our self-service portal and maybe they're in a hurry, maybe the request doesn't fit cleanly into one of the services we have defined — they can just go right into Sera AI and say what they need in normal English, and it makes it over to us."

The friction of having to learn the system instead of just reporting the problem: Users don't come to the service portal to learn how to use a service portal. They come to have their issue solved. If the system makes you do the work — figuring out categories, navigating menus, filling out forms that ask questions you don't know the answer to — you are not winning any advocates.

Phil nailed this: "Anyone that's put in IT tickets — you want to get it in and move on with your life. I'm not here to learn the system. I'm here to report a problem and get on with my day job."

Enter the Virtual Agent

Sera AI is Xurrent's embedded intelligence layer that powers the virtual agent, but it's far more than a simple chatbot.

Our virtual agent allows users to describe their problem in plain language. From there, the virtual agent figures out where it should go, asking follow-up questions if needed (based on templates the team has configured). Users never have to know the org chart or the service catalog.

As Phil shared,

"I primarily interact with the virtual agent and explain the problem I'm having. The beautiful thing about that virtual agent is that it sort of abstracts everything. So I don't have to understand that this should go to marketing or this should go to IT. I just tell my problem and that thing sends it off to the right team."

He shared an example, as can be seen in this short clip:

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But Phil is not the only person at Xurrent who takes advantage of our virtual agent. Cory Apperson, Xurrent's Chief Operating Officer, uses it "to create tickets [for] other internal teams."

"If it's TeamOps," she continues, "I'll use the virtual agent to create tickets for them. I've used it a couple of times for marketing when we need to update something on the marketing website — that gets into the marketing queue, and I have the AI just handle it for me."

Note: Cory isn't submitting tickets to IT — she's using the virtual agent to route requests across the organization. Marketing, TeamOps, wherever. Same tool, different use case.

Sera AI is the fabric, not just a feature

The virtual agent is the most visible part of Sera AI, the front-end manifestation, but it's certainly not the only part.

We call it the "fabric" of the Xurrent platform. It's not a standalone tool you go to — it's woven throughout the platform, with intelligence infused into every layer of service delivery.

As Phil notes,

"We have this concept of Sera AI that's a bit of a fabric that ripples throughout the tools. Whether you know you're interacting with Sera or not, it is running in the background."

Sera is also used for summarization, sentiment analysis, auto-translation, knowledge article creation, knowledge article improvement, and our automation builder, to name a few.

Cory Apperson shared how she uses AI Summarization:

"I do use the AI notes summary a lot of times, especially if I'm tagged into a request that has a lot of commentary and notes. So I get a summary and then I kind of go to the bottom and check and see what's happening there."

John Davis, Xurrent's Director of Business Operations, added:

"Sera AI has saved me a ton of time because sometimes a ticket might've been with another team for a week with a lot of history on it before it makes it to us. The AI summarize feature can save a ton of time in getting to the bottom of what's already been done, what are the next steps, and how we're going to get this resolved as quickly as possible."

Summarization isn't the only thing happening in the background. For Tuan Vu, Xurrent's Global Training & Enablement Specialist, it's auto-translation that makes the difference.

Read our complete guide to Xurrent's AI-related features and functionality to learn more.

Why all of this matters

What does this actually mean for day-to-day work? In short:

• Friction disappears for end users (they just describe the problem)
• Specialists save time on triage and catch-up
• The system gets smarter over time (knowledge articles, automation suggestions)
• AI amplifies productivity without requiring people to "learn AI."

We often refer to this as a win-win ... win ... win.

Remember: The virtual agent and Sera AI overall aren't about replacing the service desk — they're about removing the friction between people and the help they need.

Phil Christianson didn't stop using the service catalog because he was told to. He stopped because the virtual agent was simply faster, easier, and better.

And that really should be the bar for AI in service management: not "does it exist?" but "is it good enough that people actually use it?"

At Xurrent, the answer is yes — from the CPO down.

In the final post of this series, we'll look at how several Xurrent employees are using automation rules to eliminate repetitive work entirely — and how Sera AI can build those rules in 15 seconds from plain English.

Want to see how Sera AI could work in your organization? Get started with Xurrent today.