Digital business transformation has been driving a fundamental shift in the way IT teams operate as ongoing economic headwinds drive more organizations to prize agility. However, most organizations today continue to be hamstrung by legacy platforms and processes that are not flexible enough to provide the level of agility organizations require. Generative artificial intelligence (AI) coupled with automation frameworks, however, are now poised to provide the connective tissue needed to break that logjam.
Today most IT organizations are organized around silos of expertise such as DevOps, DataOps and more traditional IT service management (ITSM) based on tickets that get generated every time there is a request for help. The issue that creates is by the time all the various silos are navigated, the time it takes to make a change extends.
Automation frameworks make it possible to unify those silos, but they have, up until now, required a lot of time and effort to first set up and then manage. Even then, IT organizations need to create some type of self-service portal that users were expected to employ to request a service. Most IT teams have been able to automate something simple like a password change request, but more complex requests can still take multiple days. As generative AI continues to evolve, however, users are going to soon routinely use natural language to make requests that could be instantly fulfilled by an automation framework that understands those requests. As a result, the need for self-service portals and tickets to fulfill requests for IT services starts to disappear.
BMC, for example, is building a series of domain specific large language models (LLMS) to provide generative AI capabilities across its entire portfolio of platforms for providing IT services. Less clear is to what degree those types of capabilities will flatten IT organizations as more processes are automated. Most organizations will likely keep their existing IT silos in place but there will be more tightly integrated workflows that enable IT teams to respond faster to changing business conditions, says BMC CEO Aman Sayed.
The challenge organizations now face is embracing the level of cultural change that is required to be a modern business, he added. IT processes spanning everything from data management to how AI will be used to automate routine tasks will need to be revisited.
The pace at which those technical and cultural changes are made needs to accelerate, however, because over time AI will provide organizations with the same type of IT capabilities. “AI will be the great equalizer,” says Sayed.
It’s naturally still early days as far as adoption of generative AI is concerned but the art of what will soon become possible is starting to become much more apparent. Generative AI coupled with automation platforms will transform how IT services are delivered and managed. The challenge and the opportunity now is to get in front of those changes now rather than reacting to them long after rivals already have.
