Three Ways AI Will Transform IT Service Management

Doron Gordon is CEO and Founder of Samanage.

In the quest for smarter and faster services, IT departments are pioneers in deploying new methods and processes to improve internal service delivery. In the next 12 months, artificial intelligence (AI) will start driving new breakthrough features in service management that will result in unprecedented efficiencies for IT departments and organizations.

By moving service management to the cloud, IT teams have shifted from primarily handling break-fix tickets to building comprehensive service catalogs to help empower employees to get work done faster and more effectively. Now, the next wave of disruption is driven by AI and fueled by unprecedented access to data insights that are available thanks to cloud services. New AI capabilities can power a self-resolving service desk that analyzes input data and matches it to corresponding solutions.

Simply helping people get their work done is at the heart of service management. As organizations automate more services using service management tools, they also produce significantly more data. As a result, analyzing it to improve service delivery is becoming increasingly harder. The biggest productivity advances of the future will come from solutions that use technologies like AI and machine learning (ML) to harness data to deliver smarter, more efficient services.

There are three primary ways that AI will transform and drastically improve how enterprises provide internal service delivery.

First, AI will power the self-resolving service platform. Thanks to machine learning capabilities that can constantly track user behavior and make smart suggestions, service management solutions will be able to offer self-help options that reduce the number of tickets entered into the service desk. Employees would prefer to find their own quick solution to simple issues, such as setting up a voice mail or resetting their password. However, if they can’t quickly find answers on their own, they submit a ticket to get outside help. By analyzing and comparing text from the ticket to the resource pool, AI capabilities can rapidly and accurately route end users to the proper solution to solve their issues – ultimately empowering users and giving them a better experience through improved self-service.

Second, AI will help service desk teams provide a better service experience through predictive capabilities. Most tickets that are submitted to service desks are issues that have been handled many times before by the IT department, such as how to update the operating system on mobile devices. With AI, the service management solution will be able to analyze the ticket when it enters the system, look for commonalities with other tickets, and compare it to previously resolved or closed tickets – giving the IT administrator a clear path to quick resolution.

This predictive capability also extends to comparing a ticket to open tickets, giving IT departments’ visibility to potential trends that may be causing a larger impact on the organization. For example, if multiple employees report issues logging into to their email, AI-powered systems could recognize these requests as part of a bigger issue that may require escalation to a senior IT manager.

Third, AI is poised to reduce costs and free up IT teams to work smarter and more strategically. In the near future, machine learning capabilities will constantly track user behavior and make smart suggestions, while chatbots and voiced-based assistants will handle initial support. As the service management solution becomes more autonomous, human agents will save hours of time and focus on more strategic tasks, delivering consistent high-quality services.

There are additional efficiency gains from AI-powered service desks as common tickets are grouped together and identified as possible trends, helping IT administrators more quickly recognize when something needs to be escalated as a problem. Similarly, understanding past commonalities and future patterns will give IT departments the ability to identify and create alerts when they are about to miss a service level agreement.

New service management AI capabilities are rolling out and both employees and IT administrators will be able to enjoy a smarter and faster IT service desk. There may be talk about driverless cars and future package-delivering drones, but when it comes to IT service management, AI is improving the way we work - right here, right now.

Opinions expressed in the article above do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Data Center Knowledge and Informa.

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