What is AITSM?

The IT Service Management (ITSM) industry revolves around an IT service desk that works on issues for internal employees and is underpinned by a ticketing system that tracks the submission and resolution of problems and requests.

Ticketing systems have been around for years, and the biggest technological evolution they have undergone of late is moving from being hosted in-house to being offered as a cloud-based help desk. Ticketing systems are overlooked and need the transformative success of IT service desk & help desk automation.

Legacy help desk ticketing systems are reactive in the sense that someone, or perhaps some machine, has to open a ticket to report a problem before the IT team can resolve it. Multiple people are involved throughout the whole process. Without a self-service objective, information is not available for self-consumption by users.

ITSM systems are ripe for the benefits of IT service desk automation. ITSM systems are long overdue for a real makeover, replete with AI, analytics, automation, and service agent intelligence.

There will be new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and enterprise applications with native AI/machine learning built inside to improve customer experience and drive new business models. It means you won’t have to hire legions of data scientists and consultants to leverage the power of AI on a routine basis. IT service desk automation boasts self-learning capabilities to ensure a well-kept and adaptive approach to problem resolution.

“AI is the key to digital transformation — it will disrupt customer service and support by fusing behavioral analysis, application interactions, and infrastructure activity to enable automated personalized user engagements with proactive and predictive notifications and resolutions,” says Muddu Sudhakar, Aisera CEO.

This represents a major shift in the status quo; instead of hiring incredibly expensive AI specialists to write code, you’ll be showing the business leaders at your enterprise how to use read-made AI products and solutions. This is a valuable benefit for the CIO as quality AI talent is costly and hard to come by.

Additionally, major cloud providers are baking AI capabilities into their offerings. In other words, AI will become a regular feature of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and for SaaS applications. With AI, Cloud providers will be offering far more functionality than ever before.

CIOs are looking at digital strategies to elevate both employee satisfaction and customer acquisition. By leveraging AI in the workplace, they are now focused on accelerating both their organizational and technological innovation in order to respond to the market and digital workplace needs. The consumerization of the IT Service Desk has become the critical driver that has spearheaded the convergence of business issues leading to the need for personalized and proactive self-service or self-help resolutions and autonomous service experiences.

Challenges with Machine-Generated Tickets and Complex Architectures

For one thing, help desk tickets don’t just come from humans anymore, but also as machine-generated alerts. When an application starts to have performance issues, the monitoring system that watches for performance anomalies generates a ticket covering that incident directly to the help desk ticketing system.

Once you start with machine-generated tickets, the volume of open incidents skyrockets – humans on the help desk just can’t keep up. IT service desk agents begin to think of these tickets as noise and might ignore them.

Cloud has increased the complexity of computing architectures, from a traditional two-tier client-server relationship to an n-tier architecture driven by APIs. Many applications are tied together through APIs, and those APIs can come from different vendors. In this complex kind of architecture, it’s a challenge for humans to determine the root cause of problems and resolve them.

And here we are, adding to service agents’ workload by giving them more tickets to respond to and more complex issues to solve, at a time when turnover in these positions is relatively high. Could it be that people don’t enjoy being overloaded with work as they tackle mundane problems all day long?

Strategic Responses through Aisera’s Four A’s

Strategic IT modernization can lift the burden on the help desk team. Information such as historical incidents from the help desk ticketing system, and alerts from various monitoring systems, create excellent input for AI and machine learning systems to form a good parallel to what a human does in terms of root cause analysis. Endpoint and network monitoring systems should be able to provide sufficient historical and ongoing information about a user’s issues to proactively resolve them. Instead of a help desk agent chasing down a needle in a haystack, the system can sift through the clues and suggest what the problem might be and how to approach it.

CIOs often list three things that their team doesn’t do today that would make their lives much better: resolve tickets, communicate with users, and predict issues. In essence, CIOs want to modernize IT to enable service operations to be proactive, predictive, prescriptive, and personalized.

These four P’s can be addressed with Aisera’s four A’s: AI, analytics, automation, and agent intelligence. AI comes into play to correlate historical and diverse information, allowing for intelligent and optimal approaches to modernize IT.

Analytics complements AI when information volume is high and spread across different repositories. AI identifies the best piece of information to address an issue, and analytics provides historical information on the best-performing outcome for users based on the period and request.

Automation, specifically service desk automation, is leveraged by the help desk to perform the actions to resolve user problems and requests accurately, rapidly, and in high volumes. Agent intelligence, the last piece, empowers service agents by reducing their time-to-resolution for complex incidents by providing useful and intelligent next-best actions for optimal solutions. Aisera’s four A’s effectively and efficiently modernize the IT Service Desk by driving adept and robust solutions to the service desk strategically and proactively.

Aisera’s top-of-the-line AITSM solution leverages AI, analytics, automation, and agent intelligence to provide instant and effective self-service solutions to your employees and agents. Aisera’s AI Service Desk seamlessly integrates with your existing enterprise applications to ensure an easy and effective transition into your environment. Schedule a free AI demo with Aisera to see how an AI Service Management (AISM) platform can optimize your core business and deliver instant results for your organization on Day One.