IBM is already selling an automated bot that can rplace a level I support questionaire by chat or voice and saw something similar in use (but not the IBM idk how well that works) so at least you get a real, compelling case for it and it is not just up in the air
This is the area we (www.converse.ai) are focussed on, as it's solving a real pain point.
Semi or fully automating realtime customer service is definitely a real use case :)
Hmm, wonder why they aren't using it internally. IBM moves a lot of their internal helpdesk support through IM, but far as I know, there's real people on the other end of it, for all but the simplest cases.
from my experience every help desk question require a team just to find that one person which has the knowledge to answer, it'd be a haunting task to find all the bits around any products and place them in an actionable knowledge base XD
As it happens, I work on the Watson dialog service which is being used to make this and similar kinds of bots. IT support is just one of the use cases that we are working on.