AI-Based Classification of IT Support Requests in Enterprise Service Management Systems

In modern organizations, IT Service Management (ITSM) relies on the efficient handling of large volumes of unstructured textual data, such as support tickets and incident reports. This study investigates the automated classification of IT support requests as a data-driven decision-support task within a real-world enterprise ITSM context, addressing challenges posed by multilingual content and severe class imbalance. We propose an applied machine-learning and natural language processing (NLP) pipeline combining text cleaning, stratified data splitting, and supervised model training under realistic evaluation conditions. Multiple classification models were evaluated on historical enterprise ticket data, including a Logistic Regression baseline and transformer-based architectures (multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa). Model validation distinguishes between deployment-oriented evaluation on naturally imbalanced data and diagnostic analysis using training-time class balancing to examine minority-class behavior. Results indicate that Logistic Regression performs reliably for high-frequency, well-defined request categories, while transformer-based models achieve consistently higher macro-averaged F1-scores and improved recognition of semantically complex and underrepresented classes. Training-time oversampling increases sensitivity to minority request types without improving overall accuracy on unbalanced test data, highlighting the importance of metric selection in ITSM evaluation. The findings provide an applied empirical comparison of established text-classification models in ITSM, incorporating both predictive performance and computational efficiency considerations, and offer practical guidance for supporting IT support agents during ticket triage and automated request classification.