The Possibilities of Artificial Intelligence: Three Things You Can Do with AI

While the world is focused on ChatGPT and other automated research/writing applications, artificial intelligence (AI) has many practical uses in IT support. It can improve the customer’s experience by offering self-service solutions, providing context to agents, and improving proactive management of virtually all devices in the enterprise. There’s at least one thing you can implement in each of these areas. What’s the best news about this? Most ITSM tools already offer capabilities to support this, so achieving can be done with focus and configuration.

Employee or Customer Support: Self-Service

Employees love the ability to chat with someone via corporate communication channels like Teams or Slack, and many service management tools offer this capability via integration between their tools and these IM platforms. With integration, tickets can be opened retrospectively to track automated closure or to open a ticket for an agent.

To make this scalable, AI can replace agents for the first contact. Traditionally, this was done using knowledge bases, but many tools can use AI, ticket history, and existing knowledge to provide potential answers to customers.

Getting Started

• Configure the chatbot to search knowledge for answers and catalog items for common questions.
• Ensure the answers exist by working with your top ten! Use reporting to find the top ten incidents, requests, and knowledge searches. Ensure knowledge articles exist and tickets have complete closure information, including instructions wherever possible.
• “Done” is not going to help the customer. Work with managers to review team tickets with insufficient closure information, starting with the last three months of tickets and moving back to six months. Use keywords to indicate senior technician fixes for which the chatbot should open tickets.

The Business Value

While many organizations don’t have sufficient knowledge bases to answer all self-service questions, ticket history can help bridge the gap. The value is the ability to get a fast answer via the corporate chat channel and return to work, improving productivity.

Analyst Support and Improved First Level Resolution

Putting information at a service desk analyst or technician’s fingertips is critical to providing the tools they need to research and resolve issues effectively. Many service management tools now offer the ability to create agent views that combine data and AI to recommend resolutions.

Getting Started

• Begin with configuring the view their ticket views to show the most recent tickets logged by the customer/employee, the devices they use, similar tickets, and related knowledge.
• Use AI to analyze and present this information in a useful manner. AI can spot trends within the user’s history, indicating repairs that might be needed, issues with a particular configuration across the enterprise, and help spot potential problems that need to be submitted for root cause analysis. It can help the agent provide a workaround and start the problem management process going.

The Business Value

Reducing resolution times and helping level 1 technicians resolve more problems is good for the end user and the technician’s job satisfaction increasing productivity and employee retention.

Proactive Device Management

Incident management is reactive because, historically, organizations didn’t have the tools to know something was breaking before it broke. AI and the data gathered by monitoring systems change this game entirely, enabling IT to get proactive with configuration corrections, patch management, and hardware repairs. This is a more complex project, but MSPs already use many techniques described but have not yet filtered down to internal IT support.

Getting Started

• Use discovery and monitoring tools to ensure every device in the enterprise is in the configuration management database, including data about hardware configuration and software levels.
• Use AI to automatically identify exceptions and correct them or log repair tickets when this cannot be done.
• Use system health analytics to generate a device health score and set a threshold to open tickets for devices that fall below the threshold. Unlike the first step, this can look at errors logged on the device, tickets involving the CI, and other data collected by monitoring systems and the service management tool.
• Work with Information Security management to include known vulnerabilities in the device health score calculations and to determine activities that could indicate a security breach. Use AI to review logs and open alerts if a potential anomaly needs investigation.

The Business Value

An improved operational environment with less user downtime results in greater employee productivity and satisfaction. This level of proactivity will also go a long way toward improving IT’s reputation within the organization. Using AI to improve security also lowers the likelihood of security breaches interrupting services.