AI-Powered Asset Management: A Game-Changer for IT Departments

Most IT organizations are under pressure to better meet business needs. This pressure can relate to increased service quality and velocity, innovation, or cost reduction. Thankfully, artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, and generative AI (GenAI) in particular, will help by improving employee capabilities and the business operations and outcomes they contribute to.

Please keep reading to find out how GenAI helps IT asset management (ITAM).

AI-powered ITAM

Corporate IT management is front and center of these technology changes, and your organization’s ITAM capabilities provide a great opportunity for GenAI to improve your IT operations and business outcomes. It’s an important area with rising IT and business influence. For example, the Flexera 2024 State of ITAM Report found that 46% of ITAM teams now report directly to CIOs or CTOs.

If you ask any ITAM thought leader about the current trends in ITAM, they’ll undoubtedly call out AI and its ability to improve ITAM data management, process and task automation, and decision-making.

Industry analyst firms also support the power of AI for ITAM. For example, Gartner Research estimates a 30% reduction in IT hardware costs, and IDC a 15-25% improvement in asset utilization. However, the ability of AI-powered asset management to help your organization goes beyond ITAM itself. In particular, enabling your corporate IT service management (ITSM) capabilities, with the ability to improve IT service delivery and support.

This article explains how AI-powered asset management is a game changer for your IT department, providing “better, faster, cheaper” asset and service management capabilities.

This article explains how AI-powered asset management is a game changer for your IT department, providing 'better, faster, cheaper' asset and service management capabilities. #ITAM #GenAI #ITSM #ServiceDesk Share on X

The current state of ITAM

For many organizations, their ITAM capabilities run smoothly, partly due to the offered technologies for managing the IT asset lifecycle (from discovery to decommissioning). However, there’s often a “killer” issue with ITAM – that of not using asset data enough to improve ITSM capabilities across IT service delivery and support.

This isn’t because of ITAM complexity. Instead, it’s because of the difficulties of providing real-time asset information within fast-moving IT service desk operations. This disconnect (between ITAM and ITSM practices) can lead to asset overspending and underprovision. For example, the Flexera 2024 State of ITAM Report stated, “Even advanced ITAM practitioners self-estimate 30% wasted spend on desktop software.”

It’s finally time to address this unwanted disconnect using the latest technologies.

What's the biggest #ITAM killer?Not using asset data enough to improve #ITSM capabilities across IT service delivery and support. #ServiceDesk #GenAI Share on X

The disconnect between ITSM and ITAM (and the solution)

The disconnect between corporate ITAM and ITSM capabilities is long-held, even though the respective teams responsible have similar objectives. The inclusion of ITAM in ITIL 4 as an ITSM management practice has helped. However, ensuring that IT service desks and other ITSM capabilities benefit from asset data can still be problematic for many IT organizations, particularly when service and asset data are stored in disparate systems.

SysAid recognized this issue and has long provided IT admins with integrated ITSM and ITAM capabilities. But now, technological advancements in the form of conversationally engaged GenAI capabilities make it so much easier for asset data to be brought into ITSM processes, especially those employed in the IT service desk. Again, SysAid has been proactive in providing customers with the latest capabilities.

Introducing SysAid AI Asset Management

A new SysAid feature that’s currently available via SysAid AI Chatbot for Agents – AI Asset Management – uses GenAI to provide context-relevant asset information within IT service desk processes. This means your service desk agents can easily gain insights about any assets connected to the tickets in their queue (and view any related issues).

The agent chatbot can provide a centralized view of all asset-related information, including warranty expiration, potential impact on other assets, asset status, software information, and ownership. This data can be presented automatically, or your service desk agents can use natural language queries to access what they need.

This asset-related data makes it easier for your agents to manage and resolve end-user issues efficiently and effectively. It also eliminates the need and time cost of your agents manually searching in the ITAM database or other managed data repositories for the necessary asset information.

However, GenAI capabilities can do more to make asset information more accessible within the IT service desk and other ITSM capabilities. Below are some examples.

The disconnect between corporate #ITAM and #ITSM capabilities is long-held, even though the respective teams responsible have similar objectives. This article looks how #GenAI can bridge this gap. Share on X

Predictive asset maintenance

GenAI can predict potential asset (and consequently service) failures or the need for asset upgrades by analyzing asset performance, usage, and historical data patterns. Once the IT service desk is alerted to any issues, your service desk agents can proactively address them, improving uptime and minimizing employee- or business-affecting disruptions.

While this might seem like a single-asset capability, GenAI can also generate recommendations for hardware replacements or software updates at an asset-type level. For example, it can flag that a specific asset type must be replaced within the next twelve months or that a critical security patch is required for multiple assets.

Automated asset reporting

While GenAI can automate the generation of ITAM reports (either on-demand or on a schedule), such as license compliance reports, trends in asset utilization, and warranty expirations, it can also undertake analytics that benefit IT service desks and other ITSM capabilities.

For example, GenAI could flag that the IT service desk currently provides expensive software such as Microsoft Project rather than a cheaper or open-source alternative (that would still meet your end-users’ needs). This data can be used to recommend cost-saving strategies. Or GenAI can provide details of the assets that must be refreshed to facilitate budget planning exercises.

The ability to request reports using natural language queries also benefits roles that aren’t proficient in the asset management tool (and its reporting capabilities). For example, non-ITAM staff can pose natural language questions such as “Which IT assets are nearing the end of their lifecycle?” This makes accessing ITAM data easier for non-ITAM staff and reduces any learning curve associated with more complex asset management tools.

#GenAI capabilities can do more to make asset information more accessible within the IT service desk and other #ITSM capabilities. This article shares examples. #servicedesk #ITAM Share on X

End-user empowerment (relative to their IT assets)

The GenAI-powered virtual agents (which might be called chatbots or Copilot) provided for IT support can also provide your end-users with ITAM-related information and actions (such that there’s no need to contact the IT service desk with their needs).

For example, your end-users can self-check the assets assigned to them, accepting those they have and rejecting those they don’t to facilitate asset audit activities and flag assets whose whereabouts and use need to be verified. They can also query whether they have the full complement of assets required for their role, with the ability to request or automatically provision missing assets, which is a potential experience-improving capability.If you want to learn more about how AI-powered IT asset management will be a game-changer for your IT department, book a SysAid demo.