Why We’re Using AI to Improve Your ITSM Processes
AI is already with us in various forms such as voice assistants, predictive tech telling us what we’ll like based on our past choices, facial recognition, chatbots. You get the idea; think of your everyday life and you can probably come up with a handful of ways that you’re already interacting with AI.
And it’s coming to the workplace too, not (as some might say) to take over the world, but as a way to enhance and improve our working lives.
The PwC report, ‘A Revolutionary Partnership: How AI Is Pushing Man And Machine Closer,’ shows us that ‘72% of business execs believe AI will be the business advantage of the future,’ and we have to admit we’re in agreement. We’re really excited about AI and we want to let you know what it could do for your organization so you can share in the excitement too. So, on that note, here’s some insight into why we’re using AI to support ITSM processes.
4 Reasons Why We’re in Love with AI in ITSM
1) AI Increases Efficiency
IT staff spend a lot of their time on repetitive admin tasks that usually don’t add much value to an organization. They’re necessary, but they’re time-consuming and so they get in the way of efficiency, slowing people down and, in some cases, demotivating them too. Where there is too much repetition there is boredom, and where there is boredom there is a lack of energy.
With one survey revealing that 73% of operations staff spend a significant amount of their time on infrastructure or platform admin and management, it’s clear that we need to change our working ways. And this is where AI comes in; machines can do those menial admin tasks instead so people can get to work on more complex jobs.
Automation can route tickets to resolver teams so service desk analysts don’t have to manually triage each ticket that comes through. With machine learning, AI will be able to categorize tickets learning from previous data (seeing how similar tickets have been categorized in the past). Virtual agents will be able to advise on basic fixes and even log tickets where necessary.
Imagine all of these tasks being taken away from your IT service desk agents who will instead be able to dedicate their attention to resolving technical queries and getting involved in more challenging projects.
2) AI Improves Accuracy
Human error is inevitable; we get tired, we have bad days, we run out of coffee. Or, you know, we’re just not robots – we make mistakes even on tasks we can usually do with our eyes closed. But AI doesn’t have that problem; AI is shown what needs to be done and then, once it’s got the information it needs, it goes ahead and does it, all day, every day. AI doesn’t need a good night’s sleep, it doesn’t care if the kettle’s not on or if the biscuit tin is empty.
An Accenture study found that ‘AI has the potential to double economic growth rates by 2035 and boost labor production by up to 40%’. That’s all in the way it helps us to become more accurate and more efficient.
Where human error exists in our ITSM processes AI can help us remove it. By improving accuracy we can save heaps of time by not having to go back and fix the mistakes we’ve made.
3) AI Offers Personalization
Personalizing the customer experience is essential to businesses these days as competition increases. And it’s true for the world of ITSM too; even if you run an internal IT service desk your customers still have high expectations because of their experiences with technological advancements outside of their office.
AI has the ability to search through data collected on individuals (with their permission of course) in order to see what they like and don’t like; what’s worked for them and what they’ve dismissed. This capability means that AI can offer a personalized experience far more easily and accurately than us humans ever could in the same timeframe.
Chatbots can personalize the IT support experience for your customers and a personalized service portal can be a place for individuals to see IT content that’s relevant to their needs only.
4) AI Enhances Processes
AI is simply incredible at using large data sets to get what it needs-learning from what’s gone on before-and spotting patterns in data either to find the source of an issue (think problem management) or even to prevent an incident from happening (think proactive support).
Where there are repeat incidents coming into your IT service desk AI has the ability to look across all of the data collected from similar, previous incidents to not only highlight the repetition of incidents but also to enhance your staff’s ability in locating the root cause. Where were these other incidents triaged? How were they fixed? What factors do they have in common?
You might think humans should be able to pick up on a lot of the same incidents coming in but if the incidents aren’t frequent, it can be much harder to spot. Where humans might take weeks or even months to see a pattern (if they can find one at all) AI will spot it far quicker.
And for a proactive support experience AI tools will be an absolute necessity, being able to look at your organization’s historical data and noticing patterns that have resulted in incidents in order to prevent them from happening again.
Servers running on low disk space, for example, can be fixed by AI increasing the disk space before it gets so low that an incident is triggered again.
We’re certain that AI in the workplace is the future and we’re also pretty happy to come out and say we don’t think it’ll be taking over the world (well … at least not any time soon). What we do think is that AI is going to make us better at what we do and it won’t be long before those in business not using AI will begin to fall behind.
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