6 Core tenets of ITSM transformation powered by AI

There is no doubt that one can’t keep perpetually ‘experimenting’ with AI in IT service management. Organizations have to, at some point (hopefully soon), do the hard part: actually transforming ITSM with AI.

However, most companies are stuck in pilot purgatory. Atomicwork’s State of AI in IT 2025 report found that 53% of US organizations are still in early AI adoption stages. Moreover, a recent MIT report also states that 95% of AI pilots failed to deliver the financial benefits they promised.

That gap between intention and execution tells a story every CIO knows by heart. You’ve probably run a few successful AI pilots, maybe automated some ticket routing or deployed a chatbot that actually helps people. But scaling those wins across your entire operation? That’s where things get messy.

Service management is changing, whether you’re ready or not

The expectations around IT support are shifting faster than most organizations can adapt. Here's what's driving the change:

• Your employees are done with tickets: People don’t want to fill out forms anymore. They want to mention a problem in their flow of work (think Slack or Teams) and have it fixed without jumping through hoops. This is about fundamentally rethinking how support works; instead of forcing every issue through a ticketing system, success is now about preventing problems from becoming tickets in the first place.‍
• Agentic workflows are actually getting smart enough to help: Those old rule-based workflows that took months to configure and broke every time something changed? AI agents are replacing them with systems that can actually ‘reason’ through problems, understand context, and adapt when interfaces change.‍
• Everything needs to work together: Your employees don’t care that IT, HR, and Finance each have their own service desks. When they need help with onboarding, expense approvals, or access requests, they want one place to go. Modern ESM platforms bring all of this together with AI providing the intelligence to route requests properly and maintain context across departments.‍
• Support is going multimodal: People increasingly expect to get help the same way they interact with everything else, through voice commands, screen sharing, or just describing what they see. As AI gets better at understanding images and speech, support systems need to handle these interactions naturally instead of forcing everything through text forms and static help articles.

Six building blocks of effective ITSM transformations

1. Strategy always comes before tools

This sounds obvious, but most transformation efforts fail because teams jump straight to vendor demos without figuring out what they’re actually trying to accomplish. Start with an honest assessment of where you are today. Are you still mostly manual? Do you have basic ITSM tools but struggle to scale? Have you automated some knowledge deflection, but can’t get proactive?

Once you know your starting point, use a framework like A-RICE to prioritize which AI initiatives will actually move the needle.

2. Rethink existing workflows with AI agents

Here’s what doesn’t work: taking your current incident management process and adding AI on top. Traditional ITSM workflows were designed around following processes, not solving problems.

Designing newer, agentic workflows is about reimagining what’s possible when AI agents can reason, plan, and act across your entire technology stack.

3. Is your tech stack AI-ready?

Your current infrastructure probably wasn’t built for AI workloads. According to recent data, 62% of IT leaders are now planning infrastructure needs 1-3 years ahead because AI demands keep growing.

You need to think about the processing power to handle real-time AI workloads, clean data that flows between all your systems, and the ability for AI agents to actually connect and work with your existing tools. Organizations that succeed in transformation treat AI as a core layer that’s built into everything from day one.

4. Prioritize governance and security

Your environment probably has more AI tools than you realize. Chatbots in portals, copilots in applications, browser extensions that use AI, they’re literally everywhere. Without proper governance, you’ll end up with scattered data, security gaps, and no idea what’s actually happening.

Setting up a central registration system for all AI tools, defining clear handoff points between AI and human agents and being transparent about when employees are talking to AI versus humans can help strengthen governance.

5. Get ready for the new ITSM workforce

Your team is probably worried about job security, and pretending they’re not won’t help anyone.

The solution is to be honest about how roles will change and investing in helping people adapt. Start by involving your team in identifying which repetitive tasks they’d happily hand off to AI and creating new job roles–like an AI implementation specialist or AI governance leads–to help accelerate AI adoption.

6. Align on what success with AI means

ROI from AI isn’t ‘automatic’. According to our report, 71% of organizations that see positive AI ROI invested at least 10% of their IT budget in AI initiatives, forging a positive AI trust cycle for more ambitious transformations.

Define success metrics upfront across key areas like productivity gains, employee satisfaction, collaboration improvements, and business agility to prove the value of your current transformation efforts.

What happens next

Most CIOs understand that AI will fundamentally change how IT support works. The question is whether you’ll lead that change or react to it.

The organizations that thrive will rethink how service delivery works from the ground up. They’ll invest in their people, establish clear governance, and measure success systematically.

This transformation requires frameworks, detailed implementation plans, and insights from organizations that have already made the journey successfully–all of which are included in our newly launched service management transformation kit for modern CIOs like you.

Download the kit and accelerate your ITSM transformation journey.