We asked Sam, “What happens if Console disappears tomorrow?” 

Sam didn’t hesitate, "I think we'd go back five years. My team would go from engineers back to legacy support. And honestly, I don't think they would stay."

Sam Williams has spent nearly four years building IT at Synthesia, the generative AI platform serving over 70% of the FTSE 100. His team of seven supports hundreds of employees across a company that moves fast with 39% average YoY headcount growth since 2023. Before Console, the pace of requests was winning.

"Every reply in our IT support channel was manual," said Sam. "No auto response, no auto suggestions. We had talented people sitting there answering the same questions every day."

The Challenge

Synthesia runs on Slack. Email is dead, as Sam puts it. So when IT had to route employees to a separate portal just to make a request, and then chase approvals through a system that nobody wanted to use, the friction was felt everywhere.

The team was using a legacy system that was showing its age and its pace as it related to AI just wasn't fast enough. The tool also didn't connect to Notion, which is where every other team at Synthesia lives. 

The access request process alone was taking eight to ten hours end-to-end. First response time on general support was averaging four to five hours. And the team was spending the vast majority of their time doing work that had nothing to do with why they got into IT.

"They ended up just being admins," Sam said. "Chasing approvers. Manually routing tickets. That's not what they wanted to do, and I wouldn't expect them to do it either."

Console's Impact

Sam found Console on Twitter, sitting on holiday. He saw a tweet from Andrei and thought it was worth a demo. What he saw convinced him quickly: natural language playbooks, deep integrations with the tools Synthesia already used, and an interface that lived inside Slack.

"The power moment was seeing that we could write automation in plain language," Sam said. "Gone are the days of drag and drop, or having to know APIs. Anyone can write a playbook. That's a game changer."

Within the first week of going live, which happened to be a week Sam was running IT solo with the rest of his team out, Console handled 70% of all requests autonomously. The team went from roughly 25% automation in their legacy tool to 70 to 75% within months, and they are still building.

Access requests that used to take eight to ten hours now close in under 30 minutes. First response time dropped from 4-5 hours to under a minute. Approvals that used to require approvers to leave Slack now happen with a single button click in the channel where they already work. And Synthesia now asks employees to rate their support experience, something they never did previously. They are currently averaging 4.8 out of 5 over the past three months.

"We never asked for employee satisfaction scores before," Sam said. "We weren't confident the scores wouldn't reflect the friction of the system. Now we are."

Beyond the numbers, the team structure changed. Synthesia no longer has a dedicated IT support person. Everyone on the team is now an engineer, because Console handles the support load and escalates what actually requires a human. Sam sees IT support becoming ~95% AI-driven, with his team shifting fully into engineering and business partnership work.

The People team now runs 15 playbooks of their own, written in natural language, without coming to IT to build them. RevOps and commercial teams have their own as well. Synthesia has seven active workspaces in Console across multiple teams, and employees only ever need to know how to open Slack to reach any of them.

A lot of what Console handles at Synthesia is complex, tier 2 work. When an employee is locked out of Okta because biometrics fail, Console verifies their identity, unlocks the account, and closes the request without IT getting involved. A task that used to take 30 to 45 minutes is now fully autonomous. Laptop refresh requests, which once required manual lookups across multiple systems, approvals from managers and finance, and manual ordering, now run end-to-end through Console, including tracking the new device and processing the return of the old one.

The team is also using Console to handle time-based access control for employees working from restricted countries, a compliance requirement that previously demanded significant manual oversight. Console detects the request, confirms the country via IP lookup in Okta, routes approval to security, grants access for the requested window, and removes it automatically when the time expires.

"We make security happy, we make compliance happy, and we make our employees happy," Sam said. "Console handles all three."

The shift Console enabled is not just operational. The career path for IT support has historically hit a ceiling at tier 3 support. Console removed that ceiling. Sam's team is growing into engineering roles, partnering with business units on systems projects, and helping open five offices this year because they finally have the bandwidth to do it.

"AI is not coming for IT support jobs," Sam said. "It's enabling the people in those roles to actually grow."