ITSM Automation: Benefits and Best Practices

IT Service Management (ITSM) is the structured approach organisations use to design, deliver, manage, and improve the way IT services are delivered to users. It’s about aligning IT services to business needs, ensuring consistent and efficient support for employees and customers.

ITSM covers processes like incident management, change management, and asset management, often guided by frameworks like ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) to improve service quality, reduce downtime, and drive operational efficiency.

Through Automated IT Service Management, companies can increase operational efficiency and productivity by simplifying processes and removing manual tasks. This saves costs and time and allows the workforce to focus on real business activities. ITSM automation can automate up to 45% of paid work, that’s $1 trillion in annual wages, according to McKinsey.

Employees expect enterprise IT to deliver consumer-like service experiences from ITSM (IT Service Management) tools. They demand instant delivery of highly personalized Enterprise Services on the device and channel of their preference without ever talking to someone.

Consumerization applies to any web service that users need to stay productive, including technical support with laptops or phones, with applications installed on them or accessible from public clouds, with printers, fax machines, or any other network equipment, and more.

All of these Enterprise Services are provided by IT organizations, which today are called not only to design, deliver, and support them via traditional ITSM processes but constantly optimize them to unleash employee productivity, reduce operational cost, and increase user satisfaction.

In recent years, the value offered by IT Service Management solutions has shown varying levels of acceptance from employees despite the many attempts and over-investments in optimizing the value chain and alignment of business outcomes with IT operations. Even though more and more services offered to business units and end-users are through service catalogs, ITSM has repeatedly struggled to deliver on the mission. IT Service Desks today are inundated by queries, complaints, and calls for assistance.

When it comes to IT Service Management, AI and automation are the primary catalysts for radical digital transformation. But how? Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Understanding (NLU) are a key part of intelligent AI Virtual Assistants. These assistants are capable of proactively engaging with users in long and interactive conversations using natural human language. They can precisely understand and extract user intents from complex conversations and successfully self-resolve user inquiries in seconds. The end-to-end experience is fluid, smooth, and immersive.

These seamless, personalized interactions are appealing because users can speak naturally when conversing with AI Virtual Assistants. Fears of being misunderstood or constrained by fixed vocabulary are extinguished as users recognize how easily AI Virtual Assistants can identify their intent. These positive user experiences drive up user satisfaction levels, leaving them eager and excited for future interactions.

AI Virtual Assistants are available 24×7 and are easily accessible to users on the device and channel of their choice (voice, text, chat, email, and more). With AI assistance at their fingertips, users can be empowered, knowing that someone will always be there to help, no matter the time or place.

AI Virtual Assistants also continuously learn from live interactions and previous conversations between users and service agents. By recognizing patterns and accumulating information from the knowledge bases from past and current requests, the prediction accuracy of an AI Virtual Assistant improves, making future resolutions faster and more efficient. AI Virtual Assistants can then take user activity and turn their attention to ticketing systems to master new ways service agents have successfully closed service desk tickets.

With the embodiment of AI ITSM (AITSM), IT organizations can finally deliver an employee-focused, timely, and effective service management automation (SMA) experience while unleashing productivity. Both service agents and employees feel connected, engaged, and confident in their service experiences. What’s more, AI and automation tools enable organizations to reduce operational costs while improving operational efficiency.

Nowadays, the above AI and automation capabilities required to modernize IT Service Management are packaged and offered in a new industry term coined as AI Service Management. AI Service Management solutions are provided as SaaS and are turnkey-ready.

AI Service Management solutions logically overlay on top of IT Service Management Solutions to immediately drive the long-waited ITSM transformation delivering the below business and operational benefits:

• Improved Customer Satisfaction: By freeing service agent personnel from daily and time-consuming repetitive tasks, AI Service Management makes agents more available for an attentive employee experience. AI Service Management reduces the likelihood of errors, increasing the accessibility to ITSM tools while removing frustrating wait times.
• Increased Employee Productivity: Compared to Service Agents, AI Service Management agents measure to be five times faster, which unleashes employee efficiency and satisfaction and boosts productivity even further.
• Greater Accuracy and Compliance: Service Agents can make mistakes. When you automate repetitive tasks and processes, you can ensure 100% accuracy, consistency, and compliance with IT operational policies.
• More Time for High-Value Tasks: By offloading the mundane and repetitive tasks to AI Service Management, organizations can free up Service Desk agents and focus their skills and experience on handling the responsibilities that add the most value to the business.
• High Return on Investment (ROI): All kinds of improvements can yield positive ROI, including technological advancements, streamlining IT operations, and upgrading the human workforce. Because AI Service Management is turn-key ready, the ITSM ROI shows up with lightning speed.

AI Service Management solutions hold a prominent position in today’s hyper-digital age. As AI continues to disrupt industries around the world, it is crucial for businesses to be on the disruptor side of the spectrum to provide superior experiences to their employees.

Digital disruption will not stop or wait for anyone; businesses themselves have to be willful and proactive if they want to stay ahead of the game. With AI Service Management solutions, businesses can ensure that they are in the best position to deliver top-notch experiences to their employees.

Alongside AI comes automation, whose primary goal is the replacement (unattended automation) or augmentation (attended automation) of existing manual IT business processes. These processes are costly, inefficient, and prone to error. Through a process called Robotic Process Automation (RPA), you can easily streamline how ITSM is delivered.

This is done by triggering and executing end-to-end workflows touching one or more back-end systems within one or many domains without any human supervision. With conversational RPA, the entire ticketing management lifecycle is fully automated, from creating a service desk ticket to routing, optimal service agent assignment, and final fulfillment.

ITSM automation is moving fast, driven by Agentic AI and the need for agile, efficient, and intelligent service delivery. We’re entering an era where AI agents don’t just react to problems, they anticipate, learn, and resolve them autonomously. One of the most exciting trends is the rise of domain-specific Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Action Models (LAMs) for IT operations, which will enable highly contextual and accurate automation of complex tasks. These models will get even more integrated with real-time telemetry, endpoint intelligence, and business rules to deliver hyper-automation that aligns ITSM to business strategy.

Looking forward to seeing a big increase in AI copilots and agentic workflows across enterprise environments. These AI agents will support incident and change management, but also play a key role in compliance auditing, asset lifecycle optimisation and sentiment aware service delivery. With low-code/no-code interfaces making AI accessible to non-technical teams and continuous learning from operational data, Agentic AI for ITSM will move from operational support to strategic enablement. The organisations that adopt these trends will lead the next wave of digital transformation, where IT becomes a business growth partner.

Whether you’re looking to reduce operational costs, accelerate resolution times, or future-proof your ITSM with AI-driven automation, Aisera provides a turn-key solution ready to deliver immediate ROI. Book a custom AI demo today to experience the next generation of IT Service Management.