Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere.
AI has already transformed small and large-scale aspects of the IT industry (the market size is expected to grow by at least 120% year-over-year)—and it's just the beginning.
Some key highlights from the last year alone are Dall-E 3 by OpenAI, Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, Google’s Gemini was launched (it’s the first model to outperform human experts on Massive Multitask Language Understanding, MMLU), and Chat GPT4.
While most of the innovations around AI are a form of generative AI, artificial intelligence that uses generative models (learned via patterns from input training data) to create text and other media, there are some other use cases that will make a big impact on IT in 2024 and beyond.
This article will explore the four areas where AI is expected to have a substantial influence on the IT industry.
1. Data Analytics and Decision-Making
48% of businesses use some form of AI to interpret and utilize big data.
Why does this matter?
Because you, as tech leader, know that data is what separates good and bad decisions. The more informed, data-backed decisions you can make, the better your business will be because of it.
That’s exactly what AI programs and tools empower IT professionals to do: use more data to form accurate insights. These programs make big data accessible. Which, in turn, can be used to improve the user experience with actions like building charts, updating product descriptions, and changing website layouts to better fit customer usage.
On top of this, predicative analytics (predicting future outcomes) help with capacity planning, predicting system failures, and optimizing resource utilization—all things that require a future-thinking orientation. To do this, information is needed on the systems, current issues, and any increases in product or server usage (when, where, and by how much)—exactly the use cases AI can help with.
This access to data for capacity planning and data-driven decisions allows IT teams to make more informed choices about resource allocation, strategic planning, and infrastructure improvements. It grants the company the ability to look at the company as a whole, rather than focusing on each individual department or sector of the business independently.
2. IT Operations and Automation
Even though digital transformations are happening at a faster pace than ever before, some IT operations departments are still behind schedule in getting their processes up to date with the twenty-first century way of doing things.While not everyone is using it today, 83% of companies claim that AI is a top priority in their business plans.
And, if it’s expected to improve employee productivity by 40%, why wouldn’t you want to invest in it?
AI can take care of routine tasks. For example, it can streamline and automate system monitoring, maintenance, and updates to free up support agents and IT personnel to enable them to focus on higher-value tasks.
AI can identify potential issues before they arise. With predictive analytics and machine learning, AI tools can find issues and create a proactive and predictive, rather than reactive, approach to incident management (increasing the IT Maturity of your business). Not only will a proactive approach to incident management decrease the downtime of your IT systems, but it will also enhance the efficiency of your teams and improve the system reliability.
3. Security and Threat Detection
A data breach in the US costs, on average, $9.48M. Considering there are over 2,200 per day across the globe, the appropriate amount of money (read: a decent chunk) should go into protecting your company’s assets.
Cybersecurity, the practice of protecting your systems, networks and digital programs from digital attacks is growing in importance year over year. There's no shortage of phishing attacks occurring via company email addresses or data getting leaked from not secure enough service desks. With AI and the increasing security standards in technology, potential security threats can be identified and resolved faster than ever before.
How?
AI is a machine after all. So, it does what it’s good at—analyzing (reading and scanning) large amounts of data in real time. The machine learning algorithms are set up to indentify patternsfind anomalies that could potentially indicate malicious activity. And, if enabled, AI can automate the next steps post-identification of a system or network anomoly. Such tasks would include an automated response to a security incident and automate alerts to look at specific servers or network traffic.
Your company will only benefit from utilizing AI tools to help prevent and mitigate cybersecurity threats—saving you loads of time and money in the long run.
4. IT Service Management (ITSM)
One thing more advanced technology has been able to do in recent years is allow your company (or the person building the product) to place the end user back at the forefront. For a while, when new technology was constantly being released and people were adjusting to computers and new processing systems, while simultaneously switching between paper and online documents, the end user got pushed aside.
But now, with the help of more advanced technology systems and tools, such as those with AI, companies can place an emphasis once again on the end user without dropping the ball in another avenue of the business.
This opens so. Many. Doors.
For instance, in a study by IBM, they found that chatbots can reduce customer service costs by as much as 30% for companies. AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants (VA) can be used to improve user support both in terms of speed and quality of service. Instead of waiting minutes or hours for a support agent to be free, users can get instant responses to common queries—keeping all parties happy. Natural Language Processing (NLP) is to the point where it enables more intuitive, natural interactions between end users and IT systems, without sacrificing the user experience.
Additionally, AI can be used to automate routine service desk tasks, optimize ITSM processes (incident and change management), and resolve problems to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of IT departments.
It’s no secret, AI will revolutionize IT.
Every part of the industry will be affected, and companies will be better for it. Automating routine tasks, enhancing security measures, making more data-backed decisions, and having self-help options to speed up support will benefit customers and companies alike. By leaning into AI for ITSM, companies can increase employee productivity and efficiency, reduce product downtime, and enhance the overall performance of their IT systems.
EasyVista is also tracking AI, and conducting research on new areas to apply it in IT via our own dedicated AI Research Lab. If you want to get into the AI rabbit hole, our team’s publications can be found here. Or to dive further into specific IT Operations and ITSM use cases, schedule a demo!
