Adding a language model to a service desk is easy. Adding one that gives an answer an engineer would trust at 2 a.m. is not. Before signing anything, ask these five questions and insist on a demonstration for each.
1. What does it answer from?
An assistant that answers from the knowledge base will tell you how the VPN is supposed to work. An assistant that answers from live system data will tell you that the London gateway's latency is up threefold since 08:10 because two ISP circuits failed over to one link. Those are different products. Ask to see the sources cited under an answer. OctoAssist shows them: network monitoring, the gateway itself, the ticketing system.
2. Where does our data go?
Telemetry, asset data and ticket text are sensitive. Ask whether the model runs in-country, whether the deployment can be air-gapped, and what leaves your network when a question is asked. OctoAssist is deployed with in-country data residency and is air-gap ready, so the answer can be "nothing".
3. Can it act, and who approves?
Answering questions is useful. Raising the P2 incident, assigning the on-call engineer and attaching the diagnostics is where time is saved. Ask what actions the assistant can take, how each is authorised, and whether every action is logged for audit. If the answer is "it only chats", price it as a chatbot.
4. What does it plug into?
Your service desk already has ServiceNow or Jira, a CMDB, monitoring and telemetry. The assistant should connect to those rather than replace them. Ask for the connector list and for how long connecting one takes. OctoAssist goes from connected to conversational in hours, not a quarter-long project.
5. How does it fail?
Every model is sometimes wrong. The question is whether it is wrong loudly or quietly. Ask what happens when the data is missing or contradictory: does it say so, or does it produce a fluent guess? Ask to see an answer where the assistant declined. A vendor who cannot show one has not tested it.
The useful test is not "can it answer?" but "can it show me why, and would I act on it?"
A note on the name
OctoAssist is IT service management software from Third Octopus, a technology consulting company headquartered in Mumbai. It is unrelated to Octopus Energy's "Octo Assist" customer fund, which search engines sometimes confuse it with. If you searched for the ITSM product and landed here, you are in the right place.
