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Transforming IT operations with AI copilots

4 min read
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by Rachel Pearson | Oct 16, 2024

There are many ways to apply generative AI to modernize IT operations. Advances in GenAI have paved the way for the development of AI-powered ITOps copilots, which have the potential to transform IT operations. AI copilots offer many benefits for IT, including improved decision-making, accelerated incident management timelines, and optimized workflows. However, it’s essential to assess the true capabilities of the tools available in the market and align them to your organization’s desired goals and outcomes.

Setting expectations

AI copilots can significantly benefit enterprise IT. As with any new technology, aligning organizational goals to realistic expectations is essential to success. Establishing goals and specifying the problems you intend to solve with AI-powered copilots is an important step. Meanwhile, as more AI copilots enter the ITOps market, realize that each has advantages and limitations for incident management use cases.

Transform operations and incident response

AI copilots can transform incident response workflows and reveal incident impact, remediation steps, and opportunities for ITOps improvement. To maximize benefits and gain tangible results, AI copilots need three components.

A foundation built on context

An AI copilot is only as good as the data that powers it. The copilot will need to know your IT infrastructure, teams, and existing workflows as thoroughly as your teams. Getting there means you need to create a strong foundation of contextual information. This knowledge foundation comes from highly correlated, full-context monitoring data, institutional knowledge, and unstructured data like transcripts. Integrating this data supports the accuracy of the copilot’s outcomes, which benefits efficiency and service availability.

Domain expertise within incident management

GenAI copilots are becoming common for a wide variety of consumer and business uses. But they’re not a universal solution. Selecting a copilot designed explicitly for IT incident management and response is crucial to achieving your organization’s desired outcomes.

Your copilot should deliver insights in an easy-to-read, structured format that makes it easy for a responder to understand the situation and take action. Examples of insights an AI copilot can deliver include:

  • Assign responders based on historical incidents and who is on call.
  • Outline incident impact and priority based on similar incidents.
  • Instantaneously surface suspected root cause.
  • Recommend potential remediation steps.
  • Generate post-mortem documents in natural language.

Organizations can also track the average time savings across administrative tasks the copilot will handle that are specific to incident response. These tasks include setting up bridge calls, contacting on-call personnel, writing ongoing and post-mortem reports, and more.

Using an AI copilot in these ways can boost productivity, allow your teams to focus on innovation and other value-added work, and create tangible value for your IT organization.

Continuous improvement and optimization

With access to the right systems, an AI copilot can optimize tools and workflows to transform IT operations and deliver tangible value. With deep contextual knowledge across all monitoring tools, copilots can identify gaps in monitoring tools, CMDBs, alert payload data, incident processes, and infrastructure. By identifying gaps and recurring issues, a copilot can suggest improvements to help optimize IT infrastructures, enhance workflows, and increase service availability.

Next steps

The excitement surrounding GenAI copilots is genuine. Your IT teams can use the power of GenAI to manage, analyze, and transform IT data at scale. Enterprises can improve team efficiency and service availability, elevating IT’s capabilities overall.