A report published by SolarWinds finds IT service management (ITSM) teams that have adopted generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are saving just under five hours responding to IT incidents.
Specifically, the analysis of more than 60,000 aggregated and anonymized customer data points from 2,000 ITSM systems finds average time saved per incident is 4.87 hours, or roughly a 18% reduction from the 27.42 hours previously required to resolve an incident.
Lauren Okruch, senior manager for ITSM at SolarWinds, said it’s becoming apparent that AI is starting to have a substantial impact on IT management as more tedious tasks are increasingly automated.
In fact, the report notes that a mid-sized IT team managing 5,000 incidents each year would recover 24,350 hours of work annually. Based on a cost of $28 per hour for a help desk professional in the U.S., that saving in time equates to more than $680,000 a year, according to the report.
It’s not clear how pervasively AI has been adopted by ITSM teams but most of them have at least now been exposed to it. While it’s not clear to what degree AI might be impacting job opportunities for IT professionals, many of them are also concluding that some elements of their jobs, such as generating incident reports, are thankfully being more automated. Before too long, many of those same IT professionals will not want to work for organizations that don’t provide the AI tools needed to automate tedious tasks, noted Okruch. The simple truth is most ITSM teams have more projects assigned to them today than they can really hope to complete, she added.
The challenge is that the more structured an IT environment is, the more value an organization will derive. Unfortunately, adoption of best ITSM practices remains uneven so some organizations might require more time to benefit from AI, said Okruch.
ITSM teams will also need to exercise a certain amount of forbearance as, for example, an AI agent learns the nuances of an IT environment, she added. Like any new member of an IT team, it takes time to get to know an AI agent, said Okruch.
Hopefully, as IT environments continue to become more complex, they will, paradoxically, become easier to manage at the same or lower relative cost. Arguably, many organizations have not deployed as many applications as they might prefer simply because there hasn’t been a large enough IT staff to deploy them.
Each IT team will need to decide how much faith to put in AI agents to automate specific tasks, but there is a wide range of tedious tasks that could be automatically assigned to an AI agent, such as, for example, updating an operating system to eliminate a vulnerability. The overall goal should be to reduce the amount of time required to complete any IT task. IT teams, however, will still need to make sure those tasks have been correctly implemented.
In the meantime, IT teams would be well advised to start identifying tedious tasks that might be better handled by an AI agent. It’s not likely AI agents will replace the need for IT professionals, but it is all but certain that the way IT is managed is about to fundamentally change, mainly for the better.
