AI Agents in ITSM – What You Need to Know

A recent artificial intelligence (AI) in IT service management (ITSM) survey by ManageEngine examined the progress of AI adoption among a sample of 300 IT professionals and their organizations. It extended beyond the current use of AI to include the future impact of AI agents.

This article presents some of the survey findings, and the full ManageEngine “The advent of AI agents in ITSM: Perception and future impact report” based on the survey results can be downloaded here.

Some summary survey findings, including the respondents’ views on AI agents

What follows is based on the “Survey highlights” section of the ManageEngine “The advent of AI agents in ITSM: Perception and future impact report.” For more details, please download the full report.

• 82% of survey respondents stated that their organization had already implemented AI features and capabilities within its ITSM practices. However, please appreciate that this could range from still experimenting with a few AI-enabled capabilities to a much broader spectrum of capabilities in production. Organizations with more employees were least likely to have already adopted AI features and capabilities.
• The top three AI use cases in ITSM were “Process optimization” (48% of the 246 respondents with live AI capabilities), “Risk advisory” (46%), and “Knowledge discovery” (42%). However, this differed by organizational size and between private and public sector organizations.
• 93% of survey respondents stated that their organization would be open to using AI agents in ITSM.
• The top three use cases for AI agents were identified as “Process mining and workflow generation” (50%), “Script generation for process automation and customization” (50%), and “Drafting and documenting post-incident reviews” (49%). The two “content creation” options were in the top three for all organization sizes, albeit in different positions.
• While 93% of survey respondents stated that their organizations were open to using AI agents, only 8% had no concerns about their implementation.
• The top three concerns about AI agent use were “AI governance, data security, and privacy concerns” (45%), “Reliability of AI agents” (39%), and “Implementation complexity” (34%). These differed little by organizational size. However, public-sector organizations had “Reliability of AI agents” as their primary worry.
• Only 32% of respondents wanted AI agents to perform service operations autonomously. 49% wanted AI agents to perform service operations with human approval, and another 18% wanted AI agents to be limited to only offering context and recommending actions. There was very little difference in these results between private-sector and public-sector organizations. There was a difference across industries, though.
• 59% of respondents believed that AI agents would replace humans in the IT workforce. This opinion was similar across organizations of different sizes.
• 62% of respondents believed introducing AI agents for ITSM would change their organization’s hiring plan (including the number of technicians to be hired in the future). Only 12% thought not, with another 26% stating it’s too early to know. The level of respondents’ opinions was similar across organizations of different sizes. However, public-sector organizations were less likely to believe that AI agents would impact their IT hiring plans.
• Respondents from organizations that have already adopted AI features and capabilities were more likely to trust AI agents and their use.

Hopefully, these insights will be helpful in your current and future AI endeavors, including the adoption of AI agents. If you want to download the full ManageEngine “The advent of AI agents in ITSM: Perception and future impact report,” it’s available here.

Further Reading

The Future of IT Is Human – What We Learned from 130+ Countries