I am still blown away at all of the great content from last month’s HDI Service and Support World, including all of the vendors that I met in the Expo Hall. There’s a lot going on with AI. So, how do you cut through the hype and figure out a way forward?
Previously on my company’s AI journey, I’ve shared how we onboarded a vendor last fall that is leveraging AI to help serve up knowledge articles to my service desk agents in an effort to reduce handle time (How My Service Desk Team is Using AI). My next challenge is to begin leveraging automation. Here’s my plan…
In order to properly leverage automation, you need to understand what you could or are allowed to potentially automate, you need an up-to-date knowledge base, a thumbs up from your IT Security and Legal teams and potentially an orchestration tool, too.
You need a solid foundation on which to build your workflows and assurance that doing this won’t cause a security breach or unintentionally break things. I met with numerous vendors at the conference that quoted very high automation capabilities (incident penetration greater than 90%), but I know that is unrealistic for me as some of our older systems don’t have open APIs and some are simply too risky to open up to an outside vendor to access.
I’m also working on figuring out what I can potentially automate, searching through incident history to find “routine” incidents that may qualify and how many of each of those I have, checking out which of our systems have open APIs and analyzing the risks of each potential automation against requirements from our Legal and IT Security teams. Once I have that list, I’ll then look at potential time savings and make that the foundation of my business case to present to leadership to move forward.
We switched to a new endpoint management tool last summer that has orchestration capabilities (and open APIs). However, we’ve not built anything out yet to leverage its orchestration capabilities. That’s going to happen this summer.
Our existing AI vendor is coming out with their automation tool in Q4 this year, so I’ve decided to wait for it, rather than integrate another AI vendor into our ITSM platform. I’m hoping we’ll have this phase in pilot by early next year, initially facing our agents, requiring them to manually kick off a suggested automation to ensure that everything is working as designed. Once we’re comfortable (and we comprehensively test in our Non-Prod environment), we’ll let the automation loose in our ITSM to work incidents autonomously.
After that, our next phase will be to stand up virtual agents facing our internal customers. I’ve been purposely waiting to do this until we first have solid and proven automation capabilities as I’m very concerned about adoption if we’re just sending static knowledge out, as users may find that annoying. I think that we’ll do much better if the virtual agent can resolve issues as well through automation, likely faster than humans can, so our end users will see speed as the differentiating factor.
A few thoughts as I head down this road:
- Remember “shift left”? In my opinion, you need to look very closely as to what your Tier 1 agents are currently doing. For example, if there are recurring issues that could be easily resolved with automation, yet with a little more work, can you stomp them out of your environment entirely? Customers are happiest when they don’t need to interact with a service desk at all!
- I’m still thinking about my knowledge base. I have a technical knowledge base for my agents, but I don’t have a non-technical one facing my internal customers. I’m thinking of how I might solve this without having to do dual maintenance every time something needs to change. Maybe AI can simplify it? I’m going to research that.
- I’m trying to stick with only one AI provider. I think that the environment gets too complex leveraging multiple AI solutions and I’m not certain that the economics are as favorable in doing that, either.
I’m excited to keep going down this road as it’s full of great potential. However, I’m going to go slowly, but methodically to ensure that technology does not get in the way of helping our internal customers. My suggestion to you is to do the same.