How Remote saves $500K annually and automates 11M tasks with AI automation

Remote is on a mission to make it simple for companies to hire and support global teams. With a suite of HR solutions that handle everything from payroll to compliance, they help businesses grow beyond borders. But as Remote’s team scaled to 1,800 employees, their internal systems struggled to keep up—especially when it came to IT support.

"We're a company of over 1,800 employees, and just last month, we processed nearly 1,100 IT help desk tickets," says Marcus Saito, Head of IT and AI Automation. "Normally, that kind of volume would overwhelm a team of three. But with automation, we perform like a team of ten."

Since adopting Zapier, Remote has completely reimagined IT operations. They’ve transformed help desk support from a bottleneck into a fast, AI-assisted experience—and in doing so, sparked a company-wide automation movement.

Remote’s results, by the numbers:

• 2,219 days saved every month across departments in 2025

• 27.5% of IT help desk tickets resolved automatically

• 616 hours saved monthly on IT support tickets

• $500K in hiring costs avoided by using automation for manual work

• 11 million automated tasks run in 2024

Supercharging IT support with an AI-powered help desk

When Marcus joined Remote, IT support was reactive and fragmented. Employees submitted requests in Slack with no formal tracking, and support tickets easily fell through the cracks. That changed with a custom-built help desk powered by Zapier and AI.

Here’s how Remote’s AI-powered help desk works:

• Multi-channel intake: Employees submit help requests via Slack, email, or a self-service chatbot.

• User validation: A Zap sends a webhook to Okta to fetch user profile details like department and role, for context and prioritization.

• AI-powered triage: ChatGPT determines the ticket’s priority and category. 

• Ticket creation: A new request page is auto-generated in Notion, where IT tracks and updates the status. It's also stored in Zapier Tables, which serves as the knowledge base for the data and powers the next step.

• Resolution Suggestions: Zapier Agents references past ticket info in Tables to automatically generate a suggested resolution. 

• Slack notification: The requester is notified with a link to the ticket and, when possible, that AI-suggested solution.

• Self-assignment: IT team members can claim tickets by reacting with emojis in Slack, which triggers a Zap to update ownership in Notion.

"About 27.5% of all help desk tickets are closed automatically," Marcus says. "That's a huge lift for a small team—and our end users get faster answers."

The impact of this automation is staggering. Remote now saves 616 hours every month on IT support alone. That’s time the team can reinvest into more strategic, high-value work, and a clear demonstration of how automation helps scale operations without scaling costs.

Building a company-wide culture of automation

Remote’s success didn't stop there. Soon, other departments—from legal to finance—were inspired by what he'd been building and knocking on IT’s door, asking for their own automations.

Marcus leaned into the momentum. He formalized a new role, IT Integrations Engineer, and built an automation team dedicated to supporting and enabling automation company-wide.

"When someone says, 'I wish we could do this,' we ask, 'What if we can?' Then we build it."

Now, with Zapier-powered workflows, Remote saves 6,659 workdays each month, equivalent to avoiding hundreds of hires. In fact, automation has helped Remote avoid $500,000 in hiring costs just on their IT team while continuing to scale.

"Without having automation, we would have to at least be double our size. Doubling is a bit of a euphemism because I think we would have died or fallen back into oblivion [without it]," said Marcelo Lebre, Co-Founder and President at Remote.

Looking ahead: Democratizing automation across Remote

“Zapier is now an integral part of not just IT but other departments at Remote, showcasing how deeply embedded Zapier is within our operations at Remote," said Marcus. 

Remote's automation journey is just getting started. With over 11 million tasks run in a single year and around 150 of their 1,8000 employees currently using Zapier, there’s room to scale the impact even further. 

By investing in scalable workflows and a culture of innovation, Remote is proving that a lean team can support a global workforce and keep growing.