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HDI Service & Support World
April 25-29, 2027
Caesars PalaceLas Vegas, NV
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How to Find the Right Balance in Your AI Implementation Strategy

AI adoption doesn't have to mean going all in or resisting it entirely. There can be a middle path built on readiness, clarity and measurement. Successful AI strategy starts with assessing whether your workforce and your data are prepared for it. Then, get specific about what problem you're solving rather than adopting AI for its own sake.

How to Turn Service Metrics into Meaningful Accountability

The biggest trap for service desk leaders is optimizing activity metrics, like ticket volume and average handle time. A dashboard can glow green, but that doesn’t mean that everything is OK. Varun Sharma offers a six-question framework for operational reviews, walking teams from facts through root cause, business impact, ownership, action and measurement.

When AI Does the Talking, What Are Humans For?

Doug Tedder says the service desk's decades-long push to reduce human interaction (self-service, shift-left, automation, "call deflection") is about to hit its logical endpoint because AI is handling routine transactions like password resets and status checks. But even though AI delivers answers, humans deliver confidence, judgment and trust. Tedder encourages agents to work with AI instead of resist it and sharpen critical thinking skills, so their decisions carry more weight.

ITSM Platforms Part 2: The Practical Shoppers Guide

Is your ITSM tool earning its keep? Here are a few warning signs that a change is overdue: frequent manual workarounds, declining user adoption and vendor stagnation. But we know that migrating can be a hassle. That’s why we came up with a six-step process that spans everything from migration strategy to making continuous improvement after go-live.

Making Knowledge a Force Multiplier in Service Operations

Knowledge management only works when it's baked into how tickets get resolved. Varun Sharma gives an example of a service desk where analysts search existing articles before escalating the problem, link what helps, flag what's missing and capture new fixes. This strategy keeps the knowledge base shaped by demand, rather than scheduled cleanup.

How Power Design Inc. Became a World-Class Service Desk

When Josh Nelson, Ph.D., joined Power Design Inc. as director of technology experience in 2019, he walked into a service desk with no processes, no meaningful SLAs and a frozen dashboard that hadn't refreshed in 60 days. At HDI Service & Support World, Nelson and his colleagues told the story about how they turned everything around. Today, the team handles roughly 10,000 tickets annually, down from 35,000, because the majority of issues are now being resolved proactively before they become tickets at all.

Your Support Team Is the AI Frontline

Tony North opened his HDI Service & Support World lightning talk by telling attendees that “trust” isn't the final step in an AI rollout. It should be seen as the first design principle. He backed it up with three cautionary tales: Amazon's hiring algorithm that penalized women's resumes, San Francisco's benefits system that incorrectly denied claims to 14% of employees due to English-language bias and Delta's AI-dependent scheduling system that collapsed during the 2024 CrowdStrike outage with no manual backup in place. In each case, support teams were left to deal with the chaos.

Automation Is Still Better Than AI. Let Me Show You Why.

In a rush toward "AI-powered" everything, many IT organizations are overlooking dependable automation. In his newest blog, Matt Beran says automation can outperform AI in situations with clear, repeatable rules. Also, automation wins on cost and reliability, since AI usage fees add up fast. Well-built workflows keep delivering value with no per-use cost.

Your KB Articles Have Too Many Notes

Most knowledge base articles lean too heavily on the word "Note." These “Notes” obscure action items, bury context and make already-complex content harder to follow. Instead, turn the “Note” into a numbered step, fold it into an overview statement before the steps begin or replace the word "Note" with something more specific, like "Warning," "Reminder" or "For Contractors.”

Why Nobody is Reading Your Reports

Most reports don’t fail because they lack data. They fail because they don’t inspire action. In this session recap from HDI Service & Support World, Micah Armstrong shares how to stop overwhelming people with metrics and start creating reports that drive decisions. Learn why insight beats activity, how to tailor reporting by audience and why the best dashboards tell a story, not just display numbers.

How The University of Notre Dame’s Help Desk Evolved into a Service Desk

For more than 30 years, the University of Notre Dame's Help Desk was well-loved, but that wasn't enough to keep pace with the complexity of a decentralized IT environment serving students, faculty and departments with different support needs. At HDI Service & Support World, three service desk leaders spoke about what it took to evolve a function that everyone loved into something that the university can’t function without.

6 Ways to Lead When Everything Is Changing

Service leaders are navigating nonstop change, but success comes from simplifying the customer experience, breaking down silos and empowering teams to grow. In this panel from HDI Service & Support World, experts shared practical advice on redefining service, prioritizing change management, building trust across departments and laying the right foundation for AI. The key takeaway: strong leadership starts with communication, collaboration and focusing on people first.

From Friction to Fuel: Transforming Healthcare IT Service Delivery Through Human-Centered Service Management

In the ever-evolving landscape of healthcare, IT service delivery plays a pivotal role in ensuring operational efficiency and enhancing patient care. Session 506, titled "From Friction to Fuel: Transforming Healthcare IT Service Delivery Through Human-Centered Service Management," brought together two industry leaders, Nora Osman of Norvana LLC and Robert Mosquera of Parker Health Group, to share their insights on revolutionizing service management in healthcare.

HDI Announces Winners of the 2026 HDI Awards

A big congratulations to the 2026 HDI Global Service & Support Awards Winners! We had so much fun celebrating with everyone in Las Vegas this week. Check out the full list of the winners.

Beyond Technical: The Skills That Will Define Careers in the AI Era

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to reshape industries and redefine the way we work, one question looms large: What role will humans play in this rapidly evolving landscape? While AI is often seen as a disruptor, it also presents an opportunity to reimagine how we leverage uniquely human skills to complement technological advancements. The future of work is not about humans versus machines—it’s about humans and machines working together.

ITSM Platforms: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Thinking about switching your ITSM platform? Industry expert Pete McGarahan breaks down the “stay or go” dilemma with a practical, no-nonsense lens. He walks through how to weigh cost vs. value, plan a smooth transition, and minimize risk, while sharing his top tips for making the change with confidence and setting your team up for long-term success.

The Hidden Cost of Ticket Escalations and How to Reduce Them

High escalation rates are a diagnostic signal that your frontline support model has a gap. Glen Hoffmann makes the case that most escalations are avoidable, typically tracing back to outdated knowledge articles, poor ticket routing or undertrained Tier 1 analysts. The cost adds up fast: tickets handled at higher support tiers can run two to three times more than those resolved at Level 1.

Why Your Team is Struggling So Much

A service desk that's closing tickets and meeting SLAs can still be quietly falling apart. But the problem isn’t your frontline team. It’s the way your service desk is designed. Here are a few fixes you can make: redesign intake around customer intent (instead of organization chart logic), separate work types and make priorities visible from the start.

What is the Cost of Inauthenticity?

Most organizations know there's a gap between what they promise and what they deliver. The agents caught in the middle pay a big price: stress, disengagement and complicated workarounds. In his newest blog, Declan Hamilton shares a few pointers on how leaders can fix this problem.

Design a Better Career Path for Your Agents

Turnover rates in service and support teams are running between 30% and 45%. The cost of replacing one person can reach 150% of their annual salary when you factor in recruiting, onboarding and lost productivity. In a session at HDI Service & Support World in Las Vegas, Mike Hanson will make the case that most organizations are leaving a retention tool on the table: a clear, believable career path for agents.

Your Knowledge Base Articles Need Better Titles

Even if your KB feels like a mess, here’s one quick fix: write better titles for your articles. A good KB title does more work than most people realize. It tells users whether the article is relevant, whether it addresses their specific problem and whether it's worth reading at all.

4 Leadership Behaviors That Ruin Transformation

“Change” isn't a go-live date or a project end point. It's a marathon, and leaders who treat it like a sprint risk spoiling the momentum they worked to build. In his newest blog, Rocky McGuire shares a few leadership behaviors that mess up transformation. Speed is one of them. Before your next change initiative, ask yourself: If you were on the receiving end, would you feel supported, equipped and seen?

How to Build Your Next-Gen Service Desk

The next-gen service desk operating model needs to account for smarter self-service, better cross-functional collaboration and metrics that measure outcomes. Even with all the changes, the service desk will continue to be the face of IT. Consumers want to be heard, helped quickly and treated well. Building toward a next-gen service desk doesn't require a massive overhaul. It starts with one consumer journey, one cross-functional team and one set of updated metrics.

The State of Service Management in 2026

Three out of four service management teams can't find qualified analysts, half your workforce feels underpaid, and AI is reshaping job descriptions faster than you can write them. Welcome to 2026, where the talent crisis collides head-on with the automation revolution. Our latest research unpacks how industry leaders are turning these challenges into competitive advantages.

The Latte Test: Why Service Excellence Is About Trust, Not Tickets

Service excellence is about how you handle the moments when things go wrong. In her newest blog, Rina Brahmbhatt makes the case for this with a story from her favorite coffee shop: a barista who remembers her order, and more importantly, proactively communicates when something isn't right instead of hoping she won't notice.

Is Your Team Curious Enough?

Closing tickets fast will keep your dashboards green, but it won't stop the same problems from coming back. That's the premise behind "Curiosity-as-a-Service," a framework that embeds root cause thinking into every customer service interaction. Stop treating curiosity as a personality trait, but as an operational discipline.

The Rippling Impact of the Leadership Crisis

Leadership isn't complicated: people care when they know you care. But right now, we're in a leadership crisis. Gallup reports that confidence in company leadership is at an extreme low, and a huge portion of the workforce is checked out. The problem isn't just bad leaders; it's that leadership and HR have stopped prioritizing people.