IT service management aka ITSM offers great advantages to businesses for fastening their service delivery.

The global Cloud ITSM market size is expected to grow from USD 4.7 billion in 2020 to USD 12.2 billion by 2025 – Marketsandmarkets 

As digital transformation accelerates, several benefits of ITSM have recently been evaluated how AI or automation can boost up business operations and service delivery and what the future holds for this smart technology. Let’s check out the details step-by-step.

Importance Of ITSM In a Fast-Moving Digital World

ITSM plays a big role in improving businesses for delivering digital transformation to overcome today’s competitive world. This is because the methods offered by ITSM are as valuable as the technology itself. Before finding out the importance of ITSM you need to answer few questions.

• What is the actual business need?
• Who will be the stakeholders? 
• What is important for your business?
• How will it influence the business cycle?

Once you find out the answers, you will be seeing a structured process, approach, and one common platform to maintain every query effectively. The digital transformation is more about a business change than an IT infrastructure change.

However, despite the benefits of having a traditional ITSM implementation, AI can add additional feathers for businesses. With AI capabilities and AI-based ITSM tools i.e., ServiceOps, ServiceDesk Plus, FreshService, etc. Your operations teams can sustain and have smooth processes.

How Will AI Transform Service Management Processes?

Digital transformation is quickly changing the way businesses function. AI has already become an important part of our lives such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, etc., and already delivering a great experience. Thus, people expect the same quality level of experience while they come to a workplace.

Instant responses and personalization are the basic expectations that the users expect from a service desk. The service desk will rise with a new aspect if it is powered by AI and automation to provide extraordinary services that helps businesses in having much smoother processes.

Today, almost 70% of employees spend their time on the help desk doing operational activities to resolve service requests, close incident tickets, and making changes. Automating such activities will make services faster, inexpensive, and more efficient.

The global economy could see a potential contribution of $15.7 trillion from AI by the year 2030 – PwC

Organizations can use AI to smartly automate complex tasks at every stage of operation level and free help desk and IT professionals and allow them to spend their valuable time in innovative tasks. This will help them evolving the department to help achieve business goals.

What Is the Future of AI In ITSM?

There is no doubt that the future of IT service management (ITSM) will be commendable with the opportunities of AI and machine learning during the next few years. But do you know what do businesses need to do to ensure that they use AI technology to improve their business capabilities?

5G-driven AI in ITSM

The technology that will accelerate AI adoption and drive AI-driven services is 5G. AI-driven systems usually depend on computing power when it comes to usability and acceptability, but network speed is also one of the major concerns for most companies. When companies adopt AI technology, it requires a considerable amount of data, which can be sustained with 5G speeds. With the use of 5G, AI-driven ITSM will perform far better, and the usage will grow drastically in the next few years. 

AI and People

Most of the users don’t know whether they are interacting with AI and not with a person. Ultimately, the user is looking for the quickest way for a resolution, but will they understand how their data will be re-used to train AI? How do you make sure there are no dead ends or endless loops which can promptly frustrate the users, such as 404 or “page not found” error? 

The fundamental of an effective AI-enabled ITSM is its knowledge base, which needs to be updated in real-time to ensure correct answers are available all the time. Such a knowledge base is required for machine learning algorithms to find the relevant answers and edit or update them based on what is learned. So, whenever a user interacts with AI, they get the most relevant answers. This will eventually help businesses in providing excellent customer service.  

AI and Operations

While the ITSM concept is marketed as an “ideation to retirement” to manage IT services and, many ITSM procedures are concentrating only on the operational attributes of service management. 

A company that has a service desk, standard incident management, and request execution processes is more likely to have more requirements. Some companies follow a defined basic change management process that channels requests through a central authorization authority. 

Technologies such as cloud computing, machine learning, big data, automation, and Artificial Intelligence in ITSM have made businesses reconsider their ITSM strategies. In addition, new business owners will need improved customer and employee experience, which has also caused ITSM processes to go forward. IT teams need to balance the alertness of the digital economy along with organizational stability. Thus, it will be effective for businesses to have valuable AI-enabled operations. 

AI-enabled ITSM 

AI technologies can augment an organization’s approach to its IT products and service management. The AI-based ITSM tools are focused on the following technical fields –

Service Desk – To get rid of tedious and repetitive tasks, for example, regular issue resolution or request fulfillment.

IT Operations – To facilitate event management through event filtering and correlation

Incident Management – To categorizes incidents based on required standards, as well as route tickets automatically or remediate some incidents, without any human intervention.

Request Completion – Tofulfill user requests automatically, uses a self-service portal, including any kind of required approvals.

Problem Management – To use large sets of data to detect patterns and compare IT incidents.

Why an AI-Enabled ITSM Will Become an Essential Need?

Here are the reasons that might encourage companies to adopt an AI-enabled ITSM tool: 

• It helps in limiting the staff resources. That doesn’t mean a company will no longer need actual IT staff. This is the best way companies will be able to focus on IT staff’s skill development and the design of workflow processes and algorithms. 
• AI-directed tools offer standardized, reliable, and consistent approaches that can highlight anomalies and bottlenecks so that companies can reduce the IT operational clashes or siloed activities.
• It will help companies in unifying multiple sources of IT service management data. Most IT companies collect all the data that are related to IT services also from sources other than an ITSM tool, i.e., from network monitoring or application performance management.

The execution and use of AI within ITSM will not be the only thing that companies are adopting. The use of AI will not only magically fix the poor processes, but it will also help in creating a smooth system that will ease most of your worries. You just need to be clear about the primary problems that you are currently facing then only you will be able to identify your company’s AI needs.