61% of businesses have adopted AI in ITSM

Nearly 70% of IT managers expect artificial intelligence to be crucial or very important to modernising their organisation’s IT service management and IT operational management (ITSM/ITOM) capabilities, new research suggests.

A survey conducted by IDG on behalf of Freshworks found that 61% of respondents had either fully (27%) or partly (34%) deployed AI-enabled ITSM/ITOM solutions. A further 32% are exploring AI-based solutions or gathering information about them.

Among existing deployments, the most common use cases for AI include chatbots for ITSM (48%), IT help desks (39%), information security and compliance (32%), incident reporting/problem management (31%) and infrastructure or IT asset management (31%).

Companies implementing AI-enabled ITSM/ITOM have reported mixed results in terms of achieving the expected benefits. The survey found that respondents had exceeded expectations in terms of improving workflow automation, with 45% achieving this goal compared to 36% that had expected to.

AI has also exceeded expectations in terms of helping reduce IT staff workload, reduce downtime and outages, increase end use productivity and improving the perception of IT among stakeholders, but fallen short in terms of improving user experiences, reducing IT costs, improving integration of siloed systems and monitoring SLA compliance.

But respondents also cited a variety of deployment challenges that expect to inhibit the benefits of AI-enabled ITSM/ITOM adoption.

These include the speed of implementation (40%), difficulties integrating with legacy systems (40%), the overall cost of an implementation (38%) and the challenges involved in training AI bots to return the most accurate responses (39%).

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