Streamline IT Operations and Optimize Resource Utilization with GenAI

The opportunity of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) for IT service management (ITSM) brings many benefits. As with traditional automation, these benefits cover all three of “better, faster, cheaper.” However, while “cheaper” is often always good (and especially in today’s financial climate), the “better” and “faster” dimensions are likely to help under-pressure IT organizations more.

This need was reflected in the SysAid 2024 Report, which found the top three service desk goals for 2024 to be:

• Enhancing employee experience through increased AI self-service (28%)
• Better visibility and analysis into performance, improvement, and outcomes (22%)
• Improving productivity through automation (15%).

GenAI capabilities help. For example, they can streamline IT operations and optimize resource utilization so that your IT organization is better positioned to meet evolving employee and business needs. This blog explains how starting with what’s probably the most high-profile opportunity – the automation of routine tasks.

This blog looks at how #GenAI can help enhance employee experience, provide better visibility and analysis into performance, improvement, & outcomes, & boost productivity #servicedesk #ITSM Share on X

Automating your routine IT support tasks with GenAI

The automation of your routine IT support tasks using GenAI will save money. However, and more importantly, it also speeds up service delivery and makes better use of potentially limited IT people resources. A common example of the increased speed and productivity offered by GenAI capabilities is workflow automation. For instance, to automatically classify, prioritize, and route incident and request tickets to the correct resolution groups based on historical data. Other workflow automation examples include routine processes such as software updates, patch management, and system monitoring, where the GenAI-powered automation frees up your IT people to focus on higher value-adding tasks.

Returning to the automated ticket triage example, the technology can also provide automated resolution when possible. This capability is often called automated ticket resolution, where the GenAI handles your everyday IT support tasks such as password resets, account unlocks, and basic troubleshooting without human intervention.

Empowering your end-users to self-help

As with GenAI-powered automation, GenAI-powered chatbots or virtual support agents also streamline IT operations and help optimize resource utilization. They use a conversational approach to deliver a self-service-based support capability that allows your end-users to quickly get the information, service, or resolutions they need. Often without human intervention.

In dealing with end-user issues, these conversational chatbots (or Copilots) provide your end-users with information and IT support self-help capabilities, including step-by-step troubleshooting, real-time technology insights, and access to automated resolutions.

Importantly, these GenAI capabilities are available 24/7, even if your corporate IT service desk is closed. Hence, your end-users can access the IT support they need at the times when they need it.

From empowering your end-users to self-help to automating routine tasks, & even upskilling your IT #servicedesk agents, there are SO many benefits to using #GenAI capabilities within #ITSM. This blog explains. Share on X

Upskilling your IT service desk agents with GenAI

GenAI-based virtual assistants or Copilots augment your IT service desk agents’ knowledge, skills, and experience. They offer your agents real-time suggestions and access to automated actions to help with ticket resolution, meaning seasoned your service desk agents can do more than they could without assistance.

Additionally, new agents have a faster “time to value” because they can undertake new IT support activities without previous experience. Instead, they are guided by the GenAI, which provides them with a step-by-step approach and automated task options for incident resolution or service request provisioning.

Again, your IT operations are streamlined, and people utilization is optimized.

Enhancing knowledge management

Notwithstanding that many IT organizations have struggled with knowledge management, GenAI-based capabilities can improve your knowledge sharing significantly. They can create new knowledge article content from ticket information and monitor the relevancy and use of existing knowledge articles. These articles are updated as needed to ensure their continued relevance.

GenAI also helps with knowledge discovery and retrieval. For example, GenAI capabilities offer contextual knowledge retrieval to provide your IT staff and end-users with greater search accuracy – because the search results are based on the context of queries or incident descriptions rather than simply keywords.

These improved knowledge management capabilities help to streamline your IT operations and optimize people utilization.

Creating content with GenAI

GenAI capabilities offer various content creation use cases to streamline operations and optimize resource utilization. For your IT service desk, there’s automated ticket summarization. This is where GenAI-based capabilities summarize the contents of an incident or service request ticket to create a description that’s easier for human agents to consume. The summarization also benefits your ticket-closure classification and summary reporting.

GenAI-based capabilities can also generate content for your IT service desk communications. For example, they can draft messages to respond to end-users or create alerts about major incidents or changes.

A final example is the automated provision of periodic reports to your IT and business leadership and staff related to team and individual performance in the context of agreed-upon service level targets and key performance indicators (KPIs). GenAI’s analytical capabilities can also identify improvement opportunities and make data-driven predictions of future performance (there’s more on this later).

Directing work to the right people

GenAI likely knows more about your IT staff and their work than their managers ever could. Various opportunities exist to streamline your IT operations and optimize people utilization using this insight. A simple example is “next ticket selection,” where the GenAI suggests the best ticket for a service desk agent to tackle next based on multiple factors, including priority, availability, and previous experience.

GenAI-based capabilities can also facilitate a swarming approach to ticket handling within your organization. Determining the most appropriate subject matter experts (SMEs) to work on incidents and problems based on their skill sets, experiences, and availability.

Did you know that GenAI-based capabilities can facilitate a swarming approach to ticket handling within your org? This blog explains how, along with a list of other areas #GenAI can help with. #servicedesk #ITSM Share on X

Finally, GenAI also allows your IT operations to scale by handling increased workloads (using the previously mentioned capabilities) without a proportional increase in people. While not an immediately obvious “directing work to the right people” opportunity, the ability of GenAI to free up your IT staff for other work positively impacts their availability and ability to enhance their skill sets through training.

Providing greater insight

In addition to the aforementioned automated reporting capabilities, GenAI-based capabilities can automatically identify end-user device or system issues. They can also apply solutions, including workarounds. These self-healing capabilities minimize service downtime and help ensure that IT people are used efficiently.

GenAI capabilities can also analyze historical data to predict potential IT incidents before they occur. This facilitates proactive measures, as does dynamic resource management – where GenAI analyzes resource usage patterns and automatically allocates computing resources where they’re needed most.

These analytical capabilities can also be used within other ITSM practices. For example, they can assess the risks and impact of proposed changes – again based on historical data.

There are many other opportunities for GenAI capabilities to improve analytics, insights, and decision-making in your IT operations. These will be shared in a future blog.

If you want to learn more about how GenAI capabilities can help streamline IT operations and optimize people utilization in your organization, take a look at our Copilot solution.