Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Service Management
Explore how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming service management by improving efficiency, automation, and customer experiences
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How is AI impacting Service Management?
The integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into Service Management is a long-standing topic. As AI capabilities continue to advance, organizations are increasingly exploring its potential to transform traditional service management practices by streamlining operations, predicting customer needs, and delivering personalized experiences.
With the emergence of Generative AI technologies, AI now holds the potential to transform the operations of Service Desks across all sizes and sectors, particularly in areas where effective human-computer interaction and language comprehension are essential.
In the context of service management, AI can help either the end-users directly or by helping support teams work more efficiently.
Everyone from vendors to organizations is scrambling to add AI to their ITSM, IAM, and other enterprise service systems. This is often easier said than done, but not impossible.
"Generative AI technologies can generate new derived versions of content, strategies, designs, and methods by learning from large repositories of original source content. Generative AI has profound business impacts, including on content discovery, creation, authenticity, and regulations; automation of human work; and customer and employee experiences"
Source: Gartner
Why start with AI now?
AI has been around for quite a while. In fact, we were even aware of the possibilities since the last century, but it did not see as much success like it does now.
This is certainly the time to use all of the following resources to help push productivity and experience forward across industries in the service management space.
- With recent tools storing more and more information, we have an abundance of data we can use to simply draw conclusions from. In addition, with a lot of applications being cloud-based, it is easier than ever to collect data about anything and everything.
- Our computational capacity has increased immensely - CPUs have been getting faster and faster, year on year, meaning that the amount of computation is on a completely different level to what was possible in the past.
- There has been more research going in this field, which means that better algorithms across various domains were developed. As technology, computational power, and datasets have improved over time, so too has the prominence and effectiveness of AI.
Common Challenges faced by Service Desk and IT teams
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IT support workloads are increasing.
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The complexity of contacts to the Service Desk is rising.
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Infrastructure and the number of services are growing, along with the dependencies between them.
So the job of the IT Support team is getting harder by the day. Work at the Service Desk is largely communication-based, and years of automation haven't significantly changed this. Based on Gartner, over 80 percent of all requests and tickets are still handled 'manually' by agents. Furthermore, based on our experience in European markets, 40 percent of these are managed via more labor-intensive channels such as phone calls and emails. So the teams are looking for automation, but the issues are complex.
As Service Desk teams struggle with increasing workloads, increasingly complex IT infrastructures and digital services, the need for intelligent assistance, and automation is increasingly important. Service management, a field traditionally reliant on reactive and manual processes, is ripe for the new innovations:
83%
of tickets are still handled manually
25%
increase in ticket handling costs from 2019-2023
$20
average cost per agent-handled ticket
Chat / Email automation
Using Artificial Intellicenge to automate responses can lead to quick efficiency gains and frees up resources for complex tasks. At it's best, AI can maintain high user satisfaction by generating accurate, contextual and personalized responses. By focusing on chat / email automation first, organizations can quickly enhance operational efficiency, gain immediate insights into AI's impact, and set the stage for the next steps in their AI journey in service management.
AI-amplified service desk
Integrating AI deeper into the Service Desk work done by agents can increase productivity even for the more complex issues without compromising service quality for the end-user. In practice this means empowering agents with tools that streamline ticket handling via e.g. intelligent categorization, suggestions, and summarization; which all help reduce manual work.
AI support for end-users
Intelligent self-service options decrease the need for manual agent involvement and extend AI benefits to end-users. This shift not only addresses the increasing complexity and volume of service requests but also aligns with the growing user preference for self-service solutions. The introduction of AI-powered tools for end-users marks a critical step in transforming service management into a more autonomous, user-friendly ecosystem.