This post is co-written with Kenneth Salmon, Edward Boswell, Jack Armstrong, Robert Banh, and Nick Ciubotariu from ShipStation Global.

Answering the same IT questions and clearing routine tickets drains time that IT teams could spend elsewhere. To reclaim it, the ShipStation Global Engineering team built Deckhand, an AI-powered IT help desk agent for Slack, on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.

ShipStation Global is the leading intelligent shipping and logistics platform for small and mid-sized shippers, and it operates on a simple belief: the more efficient its teams are, the better it delivers for customers. Deckhand puts that belief to work. It answers routine IT and company questions from a curated knowledge base, reads error-message screenshots, and creates and updates Jira Service Management tickets.

In this post, we discuss how ShipStation architected Deckhand, which resulted in resolving 97.5 percent of incoming channel queries while earning a 96 percent positive feedback rating by employees (Figure 1).

Figure 1: 3-month channel coverage and positive feedback

Business challenge

The problem Deckhand solves is the one every IT team will recognize: the same questions are routinely asked, error messages are posted after business hours, and information needs to be gathered from different teams. At ShipStation Global, those conversations lived in a busy help desk Slack channel, where employees asked, and IT answered, one thread at a time. The answers usually already existed in a Confluence how-to article, on a company intranet page, or in a thread from eight months earlier. Finding them was the hard part.