How Xometry took a third of its help desk tickets off the queue and automated access requests

A small IT team was the middleman on every access request

When Xometry first approached Lumos, Brendan Hamilton, VP of Global Infrastructure and Reliability, had a specific goal.

The pressure came from the app portfolio. Only some apps are birthright, and many are used by just twenty or thirty people.

Many of Xometry's applications run on seat-based licenses, which turned every request into a judgment call about whether each requester needed a seat. That required knowing each application's use case and specific requirements. A central help desk team cannot retain that kind of specific understanding for hundreds of applications.

The volume of access requests Xometry dealt with every day was real. The help desk was fielding roughly fifty tickets a day, or nearly a thousand a month. Access requests were taking a considerable amount of time.

"Close to a third of our total ticket volume was access requests."
— Steve Moeller, IT Engineering, Xometry

Phase One: Getting Requests Off the Help Desk

Xometry rolled out the Lumos App Store in September 2025, with adoption faster than expected. Steve estimates it took less than a month of retraining people to stop opening tickets and start opening the App Store, and after that it stuck.

"Anytime you roll out something new, there's usually resistance. This just worked. The employees got it."
— Brendan Hamilton

Within the year, nearly all of Xometry's access requests were actually flowing through the App Store, according to Brendan. The decision had successfully moved to the people who knew the applications and the help desk was no longer involved.

With the problem of routing application requests to the right parties solved, Brendan and Steve set their sights on automating the process even further. They wanted to bring it directly to where people already submitted their requests: Slack.

Phase Two: Bring the App Store to the Employee

In May 2026, Xometry shipped a Claude-powered agent into the help desk channel in Slack. Slack was already the first stop for many employees when something went wrong, and the bot was able to handle the simpler issues that came in.

While the App Store rollout had been a resounding success, some employees were still making access requests through the help desk bot. All the bot could do was point to the App Store. It knew the answer, but it simply couldn't act on it.

The team at Xometry wanted it to be able to handle access requests from end to end.

"We said, 'Why can't we have an MCP and just have the bot automatically fill out the request on the user's behalf?'"
— Brendan Hamilton

The obstacle was authentication. In order for Xometry's Claude-based bot to file requests on behalf of many different employees, it required interactive approval that it could not fully surface through Slack. After the bot would create the access request to Lumos, it would ask for permission to send the request via a push-button prompt, but the button couldn't be shown in Slack.

What Xometry needed was API-key authentication on the Lumos MCP server, so the bot could act under its own credentials rather than waiting on a per-request approval that had nowhere to render.

The Feature Request

Xometry reached out to Andrej Safundzic, Lumos's founder, with a simple explanation of the problem they were facing. Less than two weeks later, the Lumos team had added the feature to the MCP.

Once that shipped, the integration into Xometry's system itself was short work. Steve wired it into the existing agent with "no need for deep customization".

Now, when an employee asks for access in the help desk channel, the bot is able to file the request for them. They never have to leave the Slack conversation.

"It was great to have a direct line to the founder of the company."
— Brendan Hamilton

The clearest measure of success for Xometry's automation is how efficiently it can run its IT organization. Brendan tracks it through the ratio of help desk analysts to employees, and uses typical industry staffing levels as his point of comparison.

Xometry has one service desk analyst per 350 employees.

"Our engineer-to-employee ratio isn't something you often see elsewhere. It's because of the automation we've heavily invested in that we're able to achieve all of this."
— Brendan Hamilton

Part of what makes that sustainable is that access approval is as easy for an application owner as requesting access is for a user.

"They don't have to go into the App Store or into Lumos, they don't even have to leave Slack. When someone requests access, they get a message with the full access request and can simply click a button, yes or no. Everything routes through Lumos and the App Store in the background."
— Brendan Hamilton

Governance through Lumos has paid for itself in other places too. Xometry can now grant time-bound access to expensive applications, so a seat someone needed once to look at a single report releases itself after thirty days instead of that user sitting on the license forever.

Access governance reaches beyond the app portfolio. Role levels inside Xometry's own internal platform are managed through Lumos as well.