ITSM Powered With AI

Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and IT Automation are emerging technologies today. As per research, organizations who started adopting these practices are growing rapidly.

Gartner report says, “AI will be a top 5 investment priority for more than 30 percent of CIOs.”

AI technologies will be in almost every new software product by 2020. It has the ability to learn, understand complex data, and make conclusions based on analyses. AI in ITSM applies new AI models and algorithms to the established service desk to deliver intelligent and speedy IT services. Service delivery processes can become proactive and enhanced by applying Machine Learning algorithms to the huge data collected by service providers.

Types of Artificial Intelligence for ITSM

There are three types of Artificial Intelligence emerging within the service desk environment.

Natural Language Processing

The ability of a computer program to understand human language and interact or respond.

Machine Learning

Extract data from different reports to analyze and recognize the patterns from a series of observations, and based on that make the decisions and recommendation.

Virtual Support Agents

Virtual digital assistants are chatbot programs that use virtual character acting as a service desk agent. Virtual agents are a blend of AI and Machine Learning increasingly used in ITSM that lets users find and request services through a conversational and personalized interface. It makes it easy for employees to access IT information and services using natural language across any channel they choose without even leaving their current application.

Use Cases for Service Desk Where AI in ITSM Is Transforming IT Service Delivery

1. Automatic Categorization of Incidents

   Once the user raises a ticket to the service desk through email or the self-service portal in natural language, it provides service desk employees the ability to use Machine Learning to suggest a category to address incidents.

2. Assignment of the Requests to Support Group

   The ticket raised through email or on the self-service portal by the end user, cognitive service desk can recognize patterns in the subject and descriptions of incidents and service requests. Based on pattern and most popular and repetitive issues, the system can automatically classify, categorize, and route to an appropriate support group.

3. Learning Common Processes for Automation

   The common IT processes — like employee onboarding/offboarding — require multiple activities and performed manually every day. Organizations started using Machine Learning models to learn how to manually execute these processes so that these steps can be automated. In case of employee onboarding/offboarding, Machine Learning based on historical data performs certain tasks like type of employment, role, and department of the employee, hardware, software, application access requirements, etc.

4. Generating a Knowledge Base and Repository

   Organizations started creating a centralized repository that allows developers and operations teams to keep track of changes to infrastructure as well as the knowledge articles of different incidents resolutions. In the future, if the same incident re-occurs, AI engines can mine this knowledge base and resolve the issue quickly. Service desks are using the tools to generate knowledge repositories for service requests as well and support engineers could resolve the issue quickly based on past experiences and with the help of this knowledge base.

5. Proactive Problem Resolution

   AI and Machine Learning can help to reduce issues based on predictive analysis. Based on the knowledge base and issue patterns, support persons can identify the solution before it gets impacted to the production environment. This will be easy for them to meet SLAs and customer expectations.

6. Managing Security Vulnerabilities

   IT Security has to identify vulnerabilities used for application development and configurations. AI can analyze the security reports and take necessary preventive actions.