AI's practical impact on ITSM - Highlights from SITS 2024

The Atomicwork team attended the recently concluded SITS 2024 conference in London.

Based on our observations and conversations, there is no doubt that AI is the future of ITSM. IT leaders are looking beyond traditional ITSM, they want workflows and integrations together, supercharged with AI, so they can drive business process automation. The mood has shifted from the ‘wow’ factor of AI to a more practical ‘tell me how this will drive business impact’.

Here are our top takeaways from the event:

1. Unified AI-powered platform for end-to-end IT operations is the future

AI copilots are a dime-a-dozen, and need to be integrated with helpdesk or ITSM tools to provide a truly connected experience for service teams. IT leaders are looking for AI that will intelligently understand employee and conversation context, learn from past conversations, route tickets to the right teams, and seamlessly convey the context to the service desk. Without a unified AI-powered ITSM platform, they are struggling with integration bottlenecks, loss of context, and tool fatigue.

2. Supercharging IT automation with AI is key

Intelligent workflows expand the possibilities of business process automation by combining AI’s brainpower and the muscle of automation, and herein lies the key to better enterprise productivity. Think provisioning of apps, account unlocks, or password resets - actions that take agents minutes to resolve yet sit in queues for hours, rendering users unproductive. IT professionals are excited to see AI resolve top issues that take up significant bandwidth but don’t really need a human to work on.

3. AI vastly improves employee experience

Providing fast, seamless support has always been a key goal for IT teams, and IT leaders are quickly realizing that accelerating the use of AI can slash resolution times significantly and bolster satisfaction rates. The use of AI copilots also fundamentally changes the direction of support - they bring service management to end users in the flow of their work rather than pushing users to go find services on a portal. IT leaders are recognizing and embracing this shift in user experience that is instant, personalized, and conversational.

4. Embracing AI as a productivity multiplier, not a job killer

In 2023, the rapid advancements in AI sparked debates about its potential to replace human workers, and the IT domain was no different. This year, we see more acceptance of AI as IT professionals realize it serves to augment human expertise, not replace it. Between stretched work hours and repetitive work, IT leaders that have experimented with AI in their organizations are seeing how the blending of human and artificial intelligence is freeing their teams of the mundane, to focus more on strategic, high-value work.

In conclusion, there is no denying the rising tide of AI in enterprise IT service management. However, simply "adopting AI" is not enough. Realizing its full potential requires unified, productivity-centered deployments that can thoughtfully further business goals at scale.