How AI is (already) Transforming ITSM

Ok, so we were sceptical, but Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a futuristic concept—it’s here, and it’s making a massive impact on IT Service Management (ITSM).

Let’s not overlook the fact that it comes with some maturity considerations (I’ll come back to that later), but whether it’s automating mundane tasks, predicting incidents before they happen, or enhancing the user experience, AI is beginning to change how IT teams operate, forever.

Let’s dive into some of the key ways AI is being used in ITSM today.

1. AI-Powered Chatbots and Virtual Agents

One of the most obvious and visible AI applications in ITSM is chatbots. These AI-driven assistants handle basic service requests, answer FAQs, and even guide users through troubleshooting steps. Instead of waiting in long queues for human support, employees can get instant responses.

Some advanced virtual agents go beyond simple scripts, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand context and intent. This means they can have more meaningful interactions and escalate issues to the right human agent when needed.

When done right, this can be hugely beneficial and cost effective.

But a word of warning; we’ve also seen it done very badly, and unless you have solid Incident and Knowledge practices in place, it can just create more misery to your already frustrated users.

2. Automated Incident Management

AI can significantly reduce the time it takes to detect, categorise, and respond to incidents. Traditional ITSM relies heavily on manual ticket triaging, which is both time-consuming and prone to human error. AI, on the other hand, can analyse incoming incidents, categorise them correctly, and even suggest the best resolution paths based on historical data.

Powerful stuff eh?

Again this does come back to having solid Incident data held in your ITSM platform in the first place, but this kind of automation can certainly help IT teams focus on more complex issues while ensuring end-users experience minimal disruption.

3. Predictive Analytics for Problem Management

As most readers will know, whilst Problem Management is arguably one of the most important and powerful ITIL practices, it’s often the most overlooked, due to resourcing issues. Problem Management isnt hard, it just takes time and energy, and that often doesn’t exist in busy IT teams, or just isnt prioritised.

Now, wouldn’t it be great to prevent IT issues before they happen?

AI-driven predictive analytics can actually make that possible. By analysing historical incident data, system performance logs, and real-time monitoring feeds, AI can identify patterns that indicate potential failures.

For example, if AI detects that a specific server configuration often leads to crashes, it can alert IT teams to fix it before an outage occurs. This proactive approach reduces downtime and keeps business operations running smoothly.

Now without wanting to sound like a broken record here, a precursor to this of course is solid Incident and Knowledge data in the first place. But AI supported proactive Problem Management is probably one of the most obvious and beneficial use cases today, and is definitely worth some prioritised focus if you are starting to embark on an AI journey.

4. Intelligent Change Management

Change Management in ITSM is often a tricky process to balance correctly, whilst balancing a desire to do things faster, but with one wrong move leading to system outages and major disruptions and egg on your face. AI can help assess the impact of proposed changes by analysing previous change requests, their outcomes, and dependencies between IT assets.

Do I need to repeat myself about solid Incident (and now CI) data again, no I probably don’t… but I will anyway – FOUNDATION DATA IS CRITICAL.

But with good foundational practices and solid data across your ITSM platform, and then using AI to simulate different scenarios, AI enables IT teams to make informed decisions about whether to proceed with a change, modify it, or reject it entirely. This potentially vastly reduces risks and improves the overall stability of IT environments.

5. AI-Enhanced Knowledge Management

Ahhhh our old friend, Knowledge Management. Along with Problem Management, arguably one of the most important and often overlooked practices in ITIL.

So can AI can do Knowledge Management for us…ermmm, no (at least not yet).

A well-maintained knowledge base and supporting process, is critical for efficient IT support, but keeping it up to date is of course a challenge. Tools like ServiceNow have all sorts of great functionality to help manage knowledge more effectively, but where AI can really help is by automatically extracting insights from past tickets, documentation, and even chat interactions to help keep on top of it all.

With AI-driven recommendations, IT teams can quickly access relevant solutions, reducing resolution times and improving the overall support experience. Additionally, AI can help identify outdated or redundant knowledge articles and suggest updates (although most ITSM platforms have ways to do this without AI also).

But, again let’s not forget the base data, the Incident Practice and the effort needed to put into Knowledge Management in the first place.

6. IT Asset and License Management

Let’s face it, ITAM and CMDB never quite do what you are told they will when you have your tooling demos. Not because the tools cant do it all, but it’s often not understood how much effort is needed to manage a solid effective CMDB.

Tracking IT assets and software licenses is often an extremely time-consuming, tedious, and error-prone task. AI can streamline this process by automatically identifying underutilised assets, ensuring compliance with licensing agreements, as well as predicting when hardware components are likely to fail.

So by introducing and leveraging AI to help automate asset management, organisations can most likely optimise costs and avoid unnecessary purchases or compliance penalties.

Again, base data is key here of course. But with a combination of a thrust of data cleansing and process / practice oversight, there’s some huge opportunities around AI, ITAM and the CMDB.

7. Service Reporting

No matter how good your ITSM tool is (and dare is say it, your foundational data) those pretty automated bar graphs and pie charts always need some dialogue to go with them.

Now AI can provide that for you without the manual intervention, which can save your ITSM team a great deal of time and effort. Gone are the days for SDMs needing to spend a day or two a month just creating monthly service reports.

How about that long Major Incident Report that the CIO is demanding for that catastrophic Major Incident last week, well, guess what, AI has got your back and is here to help with that too. Yes, your new best pal AI has the power to summarise and simplify all that ticket data and all those MIM calls, into one single easy to consume report. Nice!

Final Thoughts

There’s no question, that AI is starting to revolutionise ITSM.

It’s early days but where applied correctly it’s already making IT teams more efficient, helping to reduce costs, and improving service quality.

While AI won’t replace IT professionals, it will undoubtedly change how they work—allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives rather than repetitive tasks.

As AI capabilities continue to evolve, its role in ITSM will only grow. Organisations that embrace AI now will be better positioned to deliver faster, smarter, and more proactive IT services in the future.

However, we encourage you to get your foundations in place before you pull the trigger and buy all that great new AI tooling functionality, dont buy it if you're not ready for it.

What are your thoughts on AI in ITSM?

Have you seen it in action?

If you need any help with any of the topics in this article, give the ITSM People a shout - hello@itsmpeople.co.uk

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What is ITSM?

Information Technology Service Management processes include a range of activities designed to deliver and support high-quality IT services for your business. These can include incident management, problem management, change management, and service-level management. Additionally, ITSM involves continuous enhancement processes to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and reduce costs. By adopting strong ITSM practices, your business can improve service quality, customer satisfaction and achieve greater alignment between IT and business objectives. This holistic approach ensures that IT services are effective and integrated with your overall business goals. As ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with your business’s needs, you can ensure that IT processes and services support and enhance business operations. This is achieved through a structured approach to managing IT services, guided by best practices and methodologies such as ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library). These models provide guidance on best practices for delivering and supporting technology and other enterprise services and can help companies align their capabilities with their business goals and strategic objectives.
What is ITIL and how does it underpin ITSM?

We adhere to the ITIL Framework in delivering our ITSM consultancy services. ITIL is a globally recognised set of best practices for ITSM that helps businesses provide consistent, high-quality IT services. By implementing ITIL processes and principles, we ensure that your IT operations are standardised, efficient and aligned with industry standards. ITIL4 is the latest version of ITIL, designed to help enterprises navigate the new technological era known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This version introduces a more flexible, modern approach to ITSM, emphasising its integration with other areas of business management.
What are the core practices and processes in ITSM?

Effective ITSM revolves around a number of processes. Whilst there are 34 practice areas in ITIL4, there are often a core set of practices that many of our clients are particularly interested in optimising. As understanding and implementing these processes can significantly enhance the performance and quality of IT services within your organisation. Incident Management Restores all service operations back to normal as soon as possible, minimising to lessen the impact on your operations. This process might involve logging, categorising, prioritising, and resolving incidents, ensuring which can help mitigate disruption to users and the business. Configuration Management Keeps an updated record of IT infrastructure - hardware, software, and network components - in a centralised configuration management database (CMDB). This database provides accurate data on configuration items (CIs) and their relationships. Change Management Ensures any changes to your IT services are controlled and coordinated. This process evaluates the impact of changes, approving them through a structured workflow, and ensuring successful implementation with minimal risk. Service level Management Defines, negotiates, and monitors service level agreements (SLAs) between the service provider and the customer. This process ensures that agreed-upon service quality and performance levels are consistently met. Asset Management Tracks and manages your IT assets throughout their lifecycle to ensure efficient use and cost control. You maintain an accurate inventory of hardware, software, and other IT resources through this. Problem Management Identifies, analyses and resolves the root causes of incidents. Proactively addressing underlying issues can prevent recurring incidents. This, in turn, provides improved system stability and reduced downtime. Request Management Handles the lifecycle of user service requests, such as access to applications, software installations or information enquiries. It ensures requests are managed efficiently to provide a streamlined approach that fulfils user needs and enhances satisfaction. Knowledge Management Captures, organises and shares knowledge to improve efficiency and support decision-making. By leveraging a centralised knowledge base, your IT teams can quickly resolve incidents and problems, and end-users can find the right solutions to common issues.
Why is ITSM important to organisations and their IT (and Enterprise) teams?

Implementing the right ITSM strategy and optimising your tooling can provide a range of benefits for your company, including: Improved Efficiency and Cost Savings By streamlining processes and automating routine tasks, ITSM can help your enterprise work more efficiently and reduce the time and resources required to deliver and support IT services. Good ITSM is a silent enabler of success across a range of organisational goals. Improved Compliance and Risk Management ITSM can help you ensure that your IT systems and processes comply with industry regulations and standards. It also ensures that you are effectively managing risks associated with your IT operations. This can help you avoid costly disruptions and legal consequences. Increased Productivity Effective ITSM practices can help your business prevent problems and fix them quickly if they do occur. This can help you lower costs—outages cost money—and increase productivity and employee satisfaction. Better Customer Satisfaction You can improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships by delivering high-quality IT services that meet customers' needs. Improved Service Quality ITSM ensures that IT services are delivered consistently and meet agreed-upon service levels, leading to higher customer satisfaction and better overall service quality. Business Continuity ITSM processes like incident and problem management ensure that disruptions are minimised and services are quickly restored to ensure business continuity. Strategic Alignment ITSM aligns IT services with business objectives, ensuring that technology initiatives support and drive business growth. This alignment helps you make informed decisions and prioritise projects that add the most value. Enhanced Collaboration ITSM promotes a collaborative environment where IT teams can work together more effectively, sharing knowledge and best practices to improve your delivery of services. Proactive problem-solving Through problem management and a proactive approach, ITSM helps your IT teams identify and address the root causes of incidents to prevent future issues and reduce downtime. Continuous Improvement ITSM encourages continuous monitoring and improvement of IT processes, allowing your IT teams to refine and enhance their service delivery regularly. Better Resource Management With ITSM, IT teams can manage resources more effectively, ensuring that personnel, technology, and budget are allocated optimally to support business requirements.
Do you provide ITSM tooling support and what tools do you specialise in?

The ITSM People are completely agnostic with ITSM tools and not tied to any vendors. Given the close relationship between ITSM related processes and ITSM tools, we often get involved in tool selection projects, or making recommendations on how to improve tools and get the best value from them. We work with tools such as ServiceNow, BMC, Jira, ManageEngine, Fresh, Halo and Xurrent.