200 Hours a Month: How Delivery Hero Automated Account Recovery

When companies talk about AI, the conversation is usually about chatbots and drafting. The most reliable efficiency gains, however, often come from processes nobody talks about: password resets, access approvals, licence assignments. High volume, clear rules, little room for judgement.

The starting point

According to a case study by automation vendor n8n, Berlin-based food delivery group Delivery Hero handled around 800 account recovery requests a monthH. Each took 35 minutesH on average, during which the employee could not work. Dennis Zahrt, Director of Global IT Service Delivery, describes the efficiency gains since the switch as drastic.

The solution

The workflow is deliberately simple. A locked-out employee submits a form. Their manager confirms with one click. n8n then triggers the API calls in Okta, Jira and Google, documents the case in the ticket and closes it.

According to the case study, lock-out time fell from 35 to 20 minutesH. Across roughly 800 cases, that is about 200 hours less downtime per monthH. The first workflow took five hoursH to build. Offboarding and licence provisioning followed on the same pattern.

One point matters for your own business case: what was saved is mainly waiting time for the people affected, not IT working time. Both are worth money, but they are two different metrics.

The workflow

Why it works

• High volume, clear rule: Every request follows the same pattern. That makes the process automatable without any generative AI.
• A human in the right place: The manager's confirmation is the security check. Everything after it is routine.
• Existing systems: Okta, Jira and Google have APIs. n8n connects them instead of replacing them.
• Start small: One workflow, one problem. Other processes came only after the proof.

Limits and risks

• Social engineering: Whoever can fake the confirmation gets access. Approval needs a secure identity check.
• Least privilege: The automation account may only do what the workflow needs.
• Maintenance: APIs change. Every workflow needs an owner and monitoring that alerts on failures.
• Where the numbers come from: All figures come from an n8n case study and have not been independently verified.

How to find your candidate

1. Export your IT or service desk ticket categories for the last three months.
2. Sort them by count and average handling time.
3. Mark every category with a fixed rule and an available API.
4. Build the first workflow for the category with the largest product of count and duration.

Sources

1. Hn8n: Delivery Hero Case Study