A growing business often finds its most capable people answering the same questions all day. At Steno, which provides court reporting and litigation support to law firms across the United States, those questions came from a team of 100+ remote videographers running virtual depositions.
Christian George, Associate Product Manager at Steno, told Guru why every minute counts: "One of the defining features of the work of a videographer at Steno is that we have to have them sit in a remote meeting room with lawyers who are very focused, and they don't want to waste any time."
What Steno did
The internal support team fielded roughly 200 questions per day through Slack. George went through the help channel by hand and found that roughly 50% of the questions already had documented answers. He then configured a Guru Knowledge Agent called the Vid Help Assistant himself and built it in under a week. As he explained: "Those kinds of help questions were coming in more and more rapidly as Steno continued to grow, and it would have required us to continue to increase our support headcount."
The assistant sits in a Slack channel where videographers go first. It draws on Google Drive folders, Google Sheets, Guru collections and Zoom's public help center, answers in bullet points and asks for a thumbs up or down on each reply. Its prompt also tells it that video specialists do not have Zoom admin permissions. As reported by Guru in this vendor customer story, support tickets fell 48%, and a role originally scoped for two hires was filled by one.
What it already gives the business
Steno's written knowledge now reaches people at the moment they need it. Staff were told to start in the Guru channel first and to escalate only when someone needs to physically take over the room. Using Zoom's own help center as a live source also means the team no longer has to keep its own Zoom troubleshooting cards up to date.
George describes what that means for the people behind the channel: "The best thing about being able to deflect half of our questions to an agent is that it frees up our actual human support team to do the harder stuff." The experts keep their time for the cases that need them.
The ExValu perspective, a hypothesis
Where a Company Brain could take it next
The other half of the questions still needed a person. Each of those answers is new knowledge: a fix for an unusual setup, a workaround a senior specialist found under pressure.
A Company Brain could capture the answers to escalated questions, have an expert approve them and add them to what the assistant draws on, so the documented share grows month by month. That is our hypothesis, and Guru's story does not report it.
What an owner and a buyer would look for
An owner would track daily question volume, the share answered without escalation, thumbs up and down ratings and how quickly escalated questions are resolved. The thumbs down replies are the most useful list in the business, because each one points to a missing or outdated answer.
A buyer sees support capacity that grows without matching headcount and can check it in the ticket history. The next question is who keeps the source documents current. Keep client and case details out of the help sources, because deposition work involves confidential legal matters.
The problem behind this case
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About this analysis
* The image is AI-generated and does not show Steno staff. The facts and figures on this page come from the published source named below.
This is an independent ExValu analysis of a published case. Facts, figures and names are as reported in the source below, which our team checked on October 14, 2026. The ideas for next steps are our own perspective and make no claim about conditions inside Steno. To request a correction or removal, write to [email protected].
Primary source: Vendor customer story, Guru, April 2026. Available at www.getguru.com/customers/steno.