What the Introduction of AI Means for Your IT Service Desk

The opportunity of artificial intelligence (AI) for IT service management (ITSM) has been the subject of blogs, papers, webinars, and conference sessions for well over half a decade. These have explained that the addition of machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU) capabilities to ITSM tools offers up the ability for IT organizations to do and achieve so much more. But what does the introduction of AI really mean for your organization’s ITSM capabilities, especially your IT service desk?

To help, this blog explains how ITSM and IT service desk tools are changing (and have changed), the benefits, and what the knock-on effect is.

How AI is changing, and has changed, ITSM Tools

If your organization currently uses one of the most popular ITSM or IT service desk tools, it’ll either already have or will soon access new AI-enabled capabilities. These will differ by tool, but the most commonly added IT service desk AI-enabled capabilities are:

• A chatbot offers end-users a 24/7 IT support capability. The chatbot capabilities can be made available via self-service portals, mobile apps, or collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams. When using a chatbot, an end-user can request help, information, service, or change, and if the request is beyond the chatbot’s capabilities, a ticket can be logged, or the end-user passed to a live agent. For self-service portals, chatbots improve the employee experience by getting end-users to their required outcomes more quickly and easily.
• Virtual assistants. Virtual assistants help IT support staff (usually from within the corporate ITSM tool). This help takes the form of real-time access to ticket-relevant knowledge, as the service desk agents work, and “prompted” access to appropriate automation and service orchestration capabilities.
• Automated ticket triage. The AI-enabled ticket triage capability is similar to (but better than) traditional rule-based ticket routing. The capability intercepts incoming service desk tickets (both incidents and service requests) then uses machine learning and NLU to automatically categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets to resolution groups with high accuracy.
• Knowledge management enablement. Knowledge management has traditionally been, and still is, a valuable ITSM capability that organizations often find challenging to succeed with. Related AI-enabled capabilities that help here include smarter, context-based searches and the provision of “recommendations.” The AI capabilities can also identify knowledge gaps and create new knowledge articles using closed-ticket information.
• Predictive analytics. Machine learning capabilities can interpret complex patterns in large data sets to provide insights related to problems (which can be either happening or imminent) and demand planning such as IT service desk staffing optimization.

The benefits of AI-enabled capabilities

As with automation per se, AI-enabled capabilities help IT service desks be all three of “better, faster, and cheaper.” These improvements relate to IT support operations and their outcomes, especially in terms of upping the delivered employee experience.

The need for these improvements has been amplified by numerous factors in recent years, including:

• Higher IT service and support volumes
• The need for greater efficiency and potentially budget cuts
• Increased employee expectations
• Larger data sets
• Qualified-staff shortages.

AI-enabled capabilities help organizations to traverse the impact of these factors (and existing issues) by:

• Making greater use of technology, removing the pressure on human resource
• Increasing the velocity of task, activity, and workflow execution
• Reducing operational costs
• Providing 24×7 IT support operations
• Reducing human errors and their business impact
• Improving business outcomes, including the delivered employee experience.

The knock-on effect of AI for IT support

While the benefits of AI-enabled ITSM capabilities will make a significant difference to your IT service desk’s operations and outcomes, there’s a need to appreciate that while it’s a technology-based change, it also affects the people status quo. It changes traditional ways of working and is, therefore, a people-based change requiring organizational change management tools and techniques.

However, there are two specific effects of AI-enablement that are easy for organizations to overlook even when they’ve invested in organizational change management, these are:

1. The potential impact on employee experience. While the intention is, in part, to improve the employee experience, the introduction of AI-based capabilities needs to be closely monitored and managed to ensure that experiences are enhanced and not degraded through the new AI-enabled capabilities.
2. The likely impact on IT service desk performance metrics. This change is because AI-enablement removes the simpler and routine tickets from the service desk, meaning that service desk agents will be handling the more complicated issues and requests that take longer. The ticket profile mix changes as a result, from the volumes received (and handled) to the average handling time. First contact resolution (FCR) levels will also likely drop because the AI capabilities have removed the more straightforward tickets from the desk.

Hopefully, this blog has explained what the introduction of AI means for your IT service desk, if you have any questions please let me know in the comments.