AI in ITSM: Balancing Innovation with Responsibility - Fireside chat with Forrester

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the way IT teams deliver value. In this webinar, we will explore how to harness its potential without compromising trust, security, or human connection. My name is Gary Blower, I'm a service management practice lead here at Efficode, and I am joined by my fellow panelists who I will allow to introduce themselves, starting with Julie.

Hi, my name is Julie Moore, I'm a principal analyst with Forrester. My coverage areas are in ITSM, ESM, and knowledge management. Thank you, Julie. And Magnus?

Hello everyone, thank you for having me. My name is Magnus Sunset, I'm located here in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm also a service management practice lead here at Efficode. If anyone has questions as we go through the fireside chat, you can enter them in the Q&A panel below in Zoom. But what we'd like you to also do if you ask a question is to include where you're from because we're fascinated to find out where our audience is participating.

Let's kick things off with our first question. What does AI in IT service management really mean today? Julie, as someone who has done a lot of research on this, I'm going to throw it open to you first.

It's a wonderful topic because AI probably three or four years ago meant something very different than it does today. It is a collection of capabilities, everything from traditional AI to machine learning, natural language processing, and of course now we have the new entrants into the area which are generative AI and agentic AI. Essentially, what the addition of AI is doing in ITSM is allowing us to take a lot of the repetitive tasks and put more reliable automation behind the scenes. It can span everywhere from incident to problem to change to configuration, making what we do more reliable and often adding a higher level of consistency in the environment.

There are capabilities like being able to summarize note fields and put that into a record. Often, the human in the loop, with the pressure of getting on to the next call or ticket, might shortchange what they write. But the AI can create that summary and add it to the ticket, so we get really reliable, consistent results when sometimes the human in the loop doesn't have the time or patience to do some of these activities. It is a very comprehensive set of capabilities that span across IT service management.

Thank you, Julie. Magnus, do you have any thoughts on this as well?

I totally agree with that. To emphasize a bit about this summarizing, I've seen companies having tons of comments in their tickets, and it's quite cumbersome to read through all of that. A practical example would be if you have a major incident where people have been working for a couple of days, there could be hundreds of comments. Just by summarizing the whole ticket, you can get up to speed quickly when you're coming into the situation room. This way, people in the room don't have to brief you about everything that's happened during the last few hours.

As long as people are writing down things into those tickets, we can get good insights and summarize effectively. However, someone needs to update these agents over time because processes change. Taking ownership of your agents and understanding what you want out of AI is super important. If you start developing quickly using CI/CD pipelines and creating faster software, the rest of the organization needs to follow suit. If one part of the team is sprinting ahead while others are not, it creates new bottlenecks that we haven't experienced before. This is the new reality we need to navigate.