AI has been a buzzword and hot topic for a few years now and for good reasons. There is a lot that AI can do for an IT department, especially a Service Desk. We talk a lot about self-service and shift left to allow our employees to help themselves when they have an IT request or issue. But there are a lot of times when they still need our help.
Over the past year, I have been involved in building and deploying a new ITSM ticketing system for my company. The old system we used was cumbersome and confusing to the people who submitted tickets.
Our old system had 19 different forms or ticket types for people to choose from (and that was just the portal facing ticket types). That did not include ticket types for agents on the backend or our automated systems to use. The first mistake we made was trying to duplicate the old system with a better-looking interface. The problem was that our employees were confused about which option to choose because we were trying to make them categorize ticket types for us.
Uh-oh. Back to the drawing board.
Ideally, we were thinking we would have one or two forms for people to choose from. The problem with this is that everything gets submitted as a “general” incident or request. Even then, some people submit a request as an incident and vice versa. It was impossible for me to tell our CIO what our top 10 issues every week were.
How we embraced AI
There are several AI tools that can assist our industry. Another tool we have is our ITSM ticket system which has an AI built in feature. This feature allows us to use one form and let the tool assist our agents on the backend to quickly choose a ticket type and category from a short list of options that the tool recommends, based on the information in the ticket. Now, we can quickly determine if something is an incident or a request. The built-in AI system even lets us know when an incident becomes a problem and helps us link those tickets.
Taking it a step further, our ticket tool scans our Knowledge Base and lets us know what we are missing and helps us quickly get that article written and published.
Having the tickets separated by type and category, we can run them through a tool like Microsoft’s Copilot to let AI break down the top 10 incidents and requests. The great part about using AI is it not only tells us our issues by category, but also provides context.
For example, printing may be the top ticket type of the week, but with AI, it will tell us what percentage were requests for consumables like toner, connection issues from laptops or requests to have a device moved to another location.
For those of you that are concerned AI is going to replace humans, I can tell you in this case, AI has proven to be a valuable resource. Why? Because:
- Humans couldn’t do this nearly as efficiently.
- It’s a mundane task. Why waste human effort on it?