The disclosed embodiments relate to a system that suggests helpful articles to resolve a customer request. During operation, the system receives the customer request, wherein the customer request is associated with a product or a service used by the customer. Next, the system feeds a set of words from the customer request through a model to generate a request vector comprising numerical values representing words in the customer request. The system then compares the request vector against article vectors representing articles in a set of help center articles to determine whether the customer request matches one or more help center articles. If the customer request matches one or more help center articles, the system presents the one or more help center articles to the customer to facilitate automatically resolving the customer request.