How n8n's first IT hire stood up a service desk in weeks while headcount nearly doubled

The challenge: no ticketing system, no process, no baseline

"There was not an IT team at all in the company until now," Alexis Trabuchet said three weeks into the job. "There are no processes, everything is done all over Slack." Nothing was trackable, so there was no baseline for volume or response times, and things were slipping. "I'm having so much coming at me. Some things fell through the cracks. Most of it is access request management."

The environment was not small: around 50 applications under IT ownership, some 350 API keys, a MacBook fleet on an MDM that HR had managed without ever assigning a user, and a SOC 2 audit mid-cycle with 55 controls to evidence. The company was growing from about 250 people toward a target of 350 by the end of the quarter, with more than 80 open roles. Onboarding was constant - in one two-week stretch Alexis invited 150 people to a single AI tool.

n8n is an automation company, and the obvious move was to build. Alexis rejected it.

The requirements were written on day one: first-level support, recurring requests, access request automation, an accurate asset inventory pulled from integrations, and a single pane of glass. "Self-service is the word for me."

Why Harmony: time to value for a team of one

Alexis had been looking at Harmony a few days before Harmony reached out, and evaluated it against one other AI service desk vendor. The deciding factor was time to value.

A second factor was how the workflows are built. "I love vibe coding for whatever it opens, but to put it in production, especially in IT with a regulated environment behind it, I want predictability. I love this approach better than just generating code without even being able to see how it was done."

The security details mattered to someone running compliance alone: recovery keys delivered in a private DM rather than the shared IT channel, an audit trail on every action, and guardrails on what the agent may do. "I need it as proof, because some auditors are not only happy with the MDM." And later: "On other solutions I tested, you guys are the only ones making it easy to put guardrails."

"You really put yourselves in the IT people's shoes," Alexis said. "That's all the pain points I usually have. It's covered."

Deployment: six integrations and a first ticket, in 20 minutes

On the first setup call in April, Google SSO, Slack, Google Workspace, JumpCloud, SentinelOne and Notion were connected, and the first ticket - a device recovery key request over Slack DM with a one-time passcode - was completed end to end. Setup took about 20 minutes. "It's quite fast, to be honest."

n8n bought Okta in parallel, and Harmony's SSO was switched from Google to Okta live on the June kickoff call, with an Okta group mapped to the platform admin role. Alexis chose a DM-first Slack rollout to keep the IT channel clean, tested group membership and password reset agents on a ten-person pilot, and configured company context and guardrails on the service desk agent, planning to use Harmony's broadcasting feature for the launch announcement and for new joiners. Company-wide rollout happened the week of June 22, 2026, about nine weeks after the tenant was created.

The results

Since April n8n's employees have had more than 1,260 conversations with the Harmony agent, ramping from under 50 a week at launch to a peak of 165. About a quarter were resolved with no ticket at all, and 80 ended with the agent completing the action itself. The remaining requests became tickets with full tracking - something n8n had never had.

Access requests, as predicted

Nearly 30% of all tickets are application access requests. Those run through Harmony's access request agent, which resolves the request against Okta and applies the app's access policy before provisioning. Google Workspace group membership requests, routed to group owners, and Okta MFA resets are fully handled by agents, and proactive agents open tasks when a device shows EDR issues or excessive uptime.

First response is immediate: the agent acknowledges requests within seconds. SLA attainment, which Alexis wants as a personal objective, rose from 55% in the first six weeks to 79% over the most recent five, with no breaches so far in the latest week. Sentiment on the agent's answers has been positive across every feedback response recorded.

The result that matters most is capacity

"I'm opening a job in two or three months, just one person at the beginning," Alexis said before rollout. "I also have all the security side where I have to recruit a little bit. With Harmony, I wouldn't necessarily need to recruit a lot." Five months on, with close to twice as many people on the platform, IT at n8n is still one person.

What's next

Finance and the automation team have shown interest in centralizing their requests in Harmony as well. Alexis plans to keep Harmony as the IT source of truth and mirror it into Notion, using n8n itself for the sync.