A global survey of 844 IT professionals published today finds 84% of respondents report their return on investment (ROI) in artificial intelligence (AI) has either met (30%) or exceeded (54%) their expectations, with 23% noting that ROI has significantly exceeded their expectations.

Conducted by the market research firm UserEvidence on behalf of SolarWinds, the survey finds that nearly half of respondents (47%) have been applying some form of AI to IT service management (ITSM) for the past one to two years, with 85% having increased budget allocations for AI technologies.

Incident resolution (26%), knowledge management and documentation (23%), IT operations and systems monitoring (21%) and proactive incident prevention (20%) are the tasks where AI has been most widely applied, the survey finds.

Overall, more than half of respondents (52%) said AI has increased their ITSM workload as IT teams take on more tasks, compared to 30% that said their workloads have decreased. Top AI-related management tasks include managing and maintaining AI tool integrations (48%) and reviewing and validating AI outputs (47%).

The most significant cost impact has been ITSM staff training (48%), data quality and related cleanup tasks (47%), and ongoing tuning (45%), the survey finds.

Daniel Aharon, vice president of product management for SolarWinds, said the survey results suggest that as AI becomes pervasive, the majority of ITSM teams are now taking on more tasks that enable them to proactively address issues that in the past would have required a reactive response to an actual service disruption. 

It’s not clear to what degree AI may be enabling ITSM teams to manage more applications, but it’s clear that as, for example, AI agents are used to automate routine tasks such as discovering the root cause of an IT issue, there is an opportunity for ITSM teams to be more proactive. The role of the ITSM team is shifting, rather than being eliminated, said Aharon.

The challenge ITSM teams now face is making sure ITSM teams are able to track the impact preventative efforts have on the business to ensure the value of the teams is fully appreciated, noted Aharon.

At present, most ITSM teams are instead only measuring activity such as ticket volume (34%), productivity metrics such as the number of tickets resolved (45%), with only 21% tracking outcomes, the survey finds.

At this juncture, it’s not a question of whether AI will be incorporated into ITSM workflows but rather to what degree to rely on it. As ITSM teams gain more experience with AI, their overall confidence in the outputs generated generally increases. However, there is still a need for humans to supervise AI technologies that are still prone to making mistakes.

Hopefully, AI will continue to eliminate much of the drudgery that has historically resulted in ITSM staff turnover rates that are higher than most anyone likes. The challenge and the opportunity now is to recast the role of the ITSM team in a way that enables organizations to achieve business outcomes that previously would have required too much manual effort on the part of an ITSM team to actually achieve.