AG Barr resolves 60% of tickets via AI agents in Freshservice

AG Barr has spent over 150 years building some of the UK's most loved soft drinks brands, from IRN-BRU to Rubicon. Behind that growth, the IT team was stuck on a legacy helpdesk tool that could log and close tickets but couldn't report against service level agreements or show leadership any real service metrics.

Freshservice replaced that black box with structured workflows, automated change approvals, and AI-driven ticket resolution. The straightforward implementation meant that IT service delivery manager Graeme Hendry could set up the initial configuration himself in a weekend, with no formal training required.

That ease of use is why the platform kept expanding: the field sales-focused performance hub team later moved its own request tracking onto Freshservice too, with Hendry able to replicate their existing setup rather than building something new from scratch.

Today, AI agents, including one internally branded BruDog, resolve 60% of tickets. "It's like having a little AI sidekick that knows us really well," says Hendry.

The company

AG Barr is a UK-based branded multi-beverage manufacturer built over more than 150 years in Scotland, now operating across the UK and internationally. Its portfolio includes IRN-BRU, Rubicon, and Barr Soft Drinks.

The challenge

AG Barr's legacy service delivery tool integrated with Google Workspace and helped the team log and close tickets. But it wasn't built for ITIL practice and couldn't measure or report against service level agreements, leaving Hendry's team with no dashboards or reports to show what they'd accomplished.

As AG Barr grew more digital-first, and its audience became younger and more accustomed to self-service, those gaps became harder to defend. The team needed a way to promote self-service and keep up with rising digital expectations across the business without adding headcount.

Elsewhere in the business, the performance hub team, which supports field sales, faced a parallel gap. The team ran on a basic Monday.com setup that was coming up for renewal, with limited insight into incoming request types or team workload, and no clear path to scale as field sales requests grew.

The solution

Freshservice checked the boxes AG Barr needed: easy integration with Google Workspace, room to grow into self-service, and an interface simple enough for a lean team to run without hand-holding. "I got approval to try Freshservice from my manager on a Friday," says Hendry. "I spent the weekend, just an hour here or there, putting some basic rules and administration in place. I introduced it to one of my team members on Monday and asked them to log in and see what they think. They said it's ready to use! We really didn't need any hand-holding to get Freshservice going."

From there, Hendry built out the platform methodically. Active Directory integration gave new hires single sign-on and automatic email IDs, while Google Workspace calendar integration logged every change request into AG Barr's shared change calendar. A Workflow Automator categorizes tickets by criticality and routes them to the right agent group, and the Change Management module runs approvals through dedicated Change Advisory Board teams, so the right change reaches the right department automatically. Service Catalog categories, paired with a self-service portal, direct requests straight to relevant teams.

When the performance hub team came looking for a better system, Hendry replicated their Monday.com setup inside Freshservice and added context-aware self-service options, which the team then customized with its own icons for requests like cash & carry, hotel and travel, and starters and leavers. The team also built KPI and SLA-based reporting on top with Gemini AI. Separately, AG Barr began feeding incident details to an internal-only Gemini AI system that reads new tickets against the company's knowledge base and asset inventory to suggest next steps or resolutions.

Impact

The results show up in efficiency, adoption, and asset visibility alike. Freshservice's AI agents, including BruDog, now resolve 60% of tickets and close more than 2,000 tickets a month without agent intervention. Asset management on Freshservice gives Hendry's team a comprehensive view of hardware performance over time, making it simple to handle incidents and assets from the same platform, while the TeamViewer integration lets IT resolve technical issues on employee devices faster. The performance hub team now runs its field sales requests through Freshservice daily, with a custom weekly report giving field sales leadership full visibility into workload and request types.