Artificial intelligence: Making service management smarter
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Artificial intelligence: Making service management smarter
Vinesha D'Mello
4th September, 2024
8 min read
Vinesha D'Mello
4th September, 2024
8 min read
In a previous blog, we explained ‘How AI will shape the service management landscape, including the trends and challenges’. But let's take a deeper look into how AI could be applied, from an ITSM perspective.
The current state of AI
Gen AI has changed the game.* The major advances of 2023 made a big difference – from the likes of ChatGPT and Bard making a splash and big investments in AI businesses, like Microsoft dropping a staggering $10 billion on OpenAI and Amazon putting $4 billion of its chips on Anthropic.
*For clarity, when we talk about gen AI, we’re referring to applications built using foundation models, containing expansive artificial neural networks, inspired by the human brain.
More than a third of organisations are increasing their investment in AI overall because of these developments (according to McKinsey’s State of AI in 2023¹ survey). Adoption has followed suit, with one-third of organisations surveyed claiming they regularly use gen AI for at least one business function. Marketing and sales, product and service development, and service operations (like customer care and back-office support) are the functions experiencing the biggest uptake.
At the same time, policymakers have been rushing to keep up. The European Parliament adopted the EU AI Act in June 2023, which is set to become the world’s first comprehensive legal framework for AI. Meanwhile, in the US in October, President Biden signed an executive order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.
AI and service management: the perfect pairing?
According to Deloitte’s research², the majority of organisations are currently using AI to target tactical benefits, like improving efficiency and productivity, and reducing costs - service management applications certainly fall into this bracket, with
off-the-shelf ITSM tools providing integrated gen AI functionality as standard. AI can be the worker bee that busy service teams need, not only supporting productivity and efficiency, but innovation too.
The bigger question is not whether AI can play an integral and powerful role in service management – that much is clear – but if organisations are truly ready to adopt it. Let's take a look at some fundamentals before nose-diving into accommodating AI.
Shape a culture fit for the future
Firstly, businesses need a culture that embodies change, with a workforce that’s responsive to the shift embracing AI technology requires, including retraining and upskilling. As Deloitte’s report explains:
“The key is to maintain a beginner’s mindset – the belief that no matter how much of an expert you think you are, there will always be much more to learn – even as your experience grows.”²
Deloitte
This type of culture means investing in improving gen AI literacy. Yes, recruit new talent with the technical skills you need but empower your existing workforce too. This includes broad-stroke training that builds trust in these new tools and helps keep concerns at bay.
Power up with partnerships
You should also be collaborating with partners and third-party organisations to create relevant and personalised solutions, and trying out various AI offerings to find the best fit for your organisation. Scaling is a big consideration too if you want to realise the full potential AI has to offer. That means focusing on improving end-to-end processes and taking a more holistic approach to implementation. This is where partnerships can truly be of value to your organisation, with their breadth of knowledge and experience being invaluable to advise the components to build a solution that’s right for you.
Keeping up with the ever-changing (artificially intelligent) beast
The other key consideration here is that AI is constantly evolving, and you have to be able to iterate and adapt to keep up to date – with the technology and the laws that control it. Think about the guardrails you have in place to protect against macro and micro environmental changes and the processes to address issues when they arise. Don’t be reactive and wait for lawmakers to step up – ensure your own governance protects your people and data from harm.
The potential of AI-powered service management solutions
Where humans alone are concerned, service management has its limits, especially as businesses scale. The potential for error, system failure, and an unmanageable amount of customer requests are all real issues AI-powered solutions can address. AI features help take customer-centric services from being reactive to being proactive, reducing wait times, speeding up issue resolution, and transforming the customer experience - which as shown in the figure below is the number one priority.
Practical applications for AI
AI has the potential to help across, but not limited to, these four core areas:
- Incident management – automation is a game-changer here. Artificial intelligence can significantly make managing incidents more efficient by resolving low-effort incidents and escalating more complex incidents, that require human intervention. Ai can also play a part in getting to the root cause of incidents.
- Request management – virtual assistants, chatbots, and conversational AI tools are equipped with natural language processing to effectively understand and respond to user queries in a human-like manner. This helps speed up problem-solving and enhances the user experience by offering round-the-clock support. It also frees human customer service agents up to focus on more complex cases.
- Knowledge management – with your organisation’s data underpinning your AI solution and Machine Learning algorithms, it can analyse historical information to identify patterns and predict future events. This helps you proactively address big issues like server crashes. AI can also analyse and tag unstructured data, like documents and emails, making it quick to retrieve the right information when you need it. It can use all this knowledge to meet customers’ individual preferences and recommend relevant content.
- Change enablement – AI-powered solutions can support by identifying opportunities for optimisation. They’ll continuously collect and analyse data from previous change projects and current activities and trends to identify areas for improvement - providing key stakeholders with real-time feedback on areas that require attention.
Unleash untapped intelligence
AI has the potential to transform how your organisation manages services, but to do so you must invest in data management and governance, training and development, and work with specialist vendors with knowledge of AI solutions for ITSM and ESM. All the while, keeping an eye on the ethical implications of your AI efforts. If you can manage all this, you stand to unlock the full potential of AI to transform your service management system for the better.
Written by
Vinesha D'Mello
Senior Customer Success Adovcate
Vinesha is an ITSM expert with over a decade's IT experience. She is ITIL 4 qualified, and is SAFe® 5.0 Program Consultant (SPC) certified. Vinesha applies her unique cross-practice approach to help customers strategise, transform, adapt to change, and scale.