As technology evolves, so do the responsibilities of enterprise IT service desks. Fortunately, a new class of IT solutions powered by AI such as the autonomic framework Amelia AIOps (formerly 1Desk) and the digital colleague Amelia are helping to address the complexities of these new ecosystems.
As technologies for the enterprise evolve, so must IT support desks. In addition to maintaining and securing tech for employees around the world, today’s enterprise-scale support desks are tasked with guiding colleagues through their organization’s vast array of (often-unintegrated) digital systems. Fortunately, next-generation IT solutions such as AIOps can help find order in the complexities of modern enterprise digital ecosystems.
AIOps unifies existing IT operations into a single autonomic backbone, which can drastically slash both inefficiencies and overhead costs. This centralized approach empowers enterprises to automate high-volume IT tasks across departments, tap into Machine Learning to automatically create new automations, and open access to all users through Amelia’s conversational interface.
Freedom From the Mundane
When IT teams are overburdened with high-volume IT support requests, productivity for the entire enterprise can suffer. According to a 2017 survey, IT inefficiencies have an annual financial impact measured in billions, impact customer service (58% of respondents had an IT issue that prevented them from providing service to a customer) and reduce productivity (42% of users would rather try to find a workaround instead of contacting IT to fix their problem). Automation powered by AI can help address these challenges.
Many high-volume requests offer limited business value as compared to the time and resources needed to address them (e.g. password resets, common email issues, and hardware requests). The good news is that these high-volume requests are usually addressed with highly regimented actions, which makes them ideal candidates for automation. When high-volume requests are handed off to AI, they can be resolved 24/7 and usually far more quickly than with human intervention.
IPsoft’s autonomic solutions for IT are able to manage an average of 56% of IT events from end to end without any humans involved. One major insurer tapped into our autonomic technologies for their IT support desk and reduced resolution times for common tasks from 10 hours to just six minutes, while also recapturing an astounding 70 hours per day for support staff. Therein lies an added benefit of the automation of common IT tasks: When experienced and knowledgeable staff are liberated from routine work, they can address complex or unique business challenges. Furthermore, when jobs emphasize uniquely humans skills like creative problem solving, employees feel more engaged, which can help combat employee churn.
Always Improving
Not only does AI-driven IT ops efficiently execute tasks that previously required human intermediation, the system can independently expand its knowledgebase through Machine Learning. In the event that a user is not able to independently resolve a problem, the session can be escalated to an experienced human agent, but the system’s involvement doesn’t end there. AIOps will observe the engagement in the background and independently recommend new workflows for the company’s automation engineers to approve. Since AIOps has the potential to continually learn new abilities, it will only result in improved ROI as time goes on.
Open to All
Automated IT tasks aren’t fully optimized unless all employees are able to use them. Fortunately, cognitive AI empowers all users to access digital systems regardless of their department, title or technical prowess. The industry-leading digital colleague Amelia comes integrated with AIOps and allows all users to acquire information and execute complex tasks through the medium most natural to them: Conversation.
Amelia’s advanced Natural Language Interface (NLI) allows users to access the IT department just by talking to her as they would with a human agent (either via voice or typed requests). In most enterprises, a simple password reset today requires a user to either reach out to the IT department and wait to be serviced, or submit a ticket and wait for it to be executed. With Amelia, any user can access all IT services by simply saying (or typing), “Amelia, please reset my system password.” Depending on the protocol of that organization, Amelia can automatically execute the reset or she can walk the user step-by-step through the reset process. Since Amelia scales to meet demand, users never wait in queue. The important takeaways from this one example are 1) no intermediation was necessary from the IT team and 2) the user had their problem resolved quickly so they could return to being productive.
The New Workforce
As the workforce becomes increasingly global and decentralized, AI-guided automations will become increasingly vital in providing IT support. A recent study from Upwork found that 55% or hiring managers have said that remote work has become more commonplace compared to three years ago, and 53% said that companies are expecting to tap into the “flexible” workforce (freelancers, temp or agency workers). Not only will workforces of the future not necessarily be in the same office or even the same time zone, but there will be a steady influx of temporary and freelance employees who will require routine IT services related to onboarding and offboarding. The good news is that IT can automate many of these processes to keep an enterprise running efficiently.
We know from working with enterprise customers that optimizing IT support through AI-related technologies is a core operational goal for many business leaders. Some have already adopted autonomic and cognitive technologies to reach this objective, others have started down a path toward adoption, and many more are deep in discussions about AI’s impact on their operations and business. We expect the adoption of technologies like AIOps and Amelia to accelerate as the benefits of IT support desk optimization continue to be realized.