From self-driving cars that proactively avoid collisions to systems helping doctors diagnose diseases faster, Artificial Intelligence has proved it can make our lives much easier.
Not only is AI worming its way into various industries, but its also becoming commonplace in every department and subdivision in multiple organisations.
In fact, it is causing firms to reconstruct their organisational structure, including HR departments, hiring practices, and now even the IT service desk.
Although it’s still in its infancy, AI’s influence on service management grows with each passing day.
Machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and other cognitive technologies have translated to chat bots, virtual assistants, intelligent routing, user sentiment analysis, predictive analytics, contextual knowledge, and a whole lot more in service desks.
The advantages AI brings to your IT service desk
Artificial intelligence (AI) and technologies like natural language processing have changed the way people interact with machines. For instance, people can perform routine activities like grocery shopping right from the comfort of their homes using simple voice commands on their AI-enabled virtual assistants.
Put to use correctly, AI can help reduce costs, increase agent productivity, help forecast IT issues, identify problems, manage changes better, and improve key metrics including resolution times and SLA compliance level.
Gartner predicts that by 2022, 40 percent of customer-facing employees and citizen-facing government workers will consult AI-enabled virtual assistants for decision-making or process support.
Thankfully, businesses are starting to catch up. A recent Gartner survey revealed that four percent of CIOs have deployed AI in their organisations and 21 percent are piloting it or have included it in their short-term plans. AI and machine learning (ML) have become the talk of the IT service management (ITSM) industry as well.
As time goes by, AI could potentially replace the conventional IT service desk—the single physical point of contact between IT staff and end users.
This doesn’t mean that your IT staff themselves will disappear, but it could allow them to shift their attention to other roles.
These are some of the major functions AI could take over in ITSM.
The effects of AI could be felt across various ITSM modules, including:
- Service request management: Auto-approvals and custom workflows for service requests to improve the quality of service delivery.
- Incident and problem management: Proactive problem prediction and prevention to reduce service disruptions and the number of repeat incidents.
- Change management: Real-time and dynamic change workflows for risk-free change implementations.
- Asset management: Intelligent asset life cycle management to reduce outages due to poor asset performance.
All these can help increase the efficiency of IT service teams by taking menial and complex tasks off their hands, so they can focus on other important aspects of their jobs.
To better understand the effects of AI in IT service desk operations and take advantage of it, you can download the AI Advantage eBook or explore ManageEngine’s Help Desk Solution, ServiceDesk Plus for free.
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