Don’t Forget The People Needs of Your New AI ITSM Capabilities
There’s no doubt the future of IT service management (ITSM) involves artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities (as it does most corporate capabilities) or that these will significantly improve your organization’s ITSM efficiency and effectiveness. However, introducing AI capabilities is more than adding new technology. Instead, the change can also affect the people within your organization.
Given IT’s role as a corporate service provider, the possible effect is twofold (or threefold when customer-touching technology is considered), affecting both ITSM staff and the business people they serve. These effects mustn’t be overlooked. So, to help, this blog looks at some of the ways in which the introduction of new AI ITSM capabilities might affect your ITSM staff.
How new AI ITSM capabilities might affect ITSM staff
As with the introduction of any new technology, AI adoption affects more than the IT infrastructure. It also affects ways of working (processes) and the people involved. The people-based impact is multidimensional, potentially changing a raft of role attributes, including:
· Job roles and responsibilities
· Role skill requirements
· Role metrics
· Employee well-being
· Organizational culture.
It’s important that you appreciate the possibility of change-related effects in these areas and take action to ensure that your AI adoption success doesn’t adversely affect your people.
In terms of what follows, it’s impossible to cover each of these areas for every possible ITSM role, so this blog focuses on the service desk agent role in its examples.
Job roles and responsibilities
AI-enabled capabilities help ITSM staff with both their “heavy lifting” and “heavy thinking” work. The first is through automation, with AI-enabled capabilities making staff (and processes) more efficient and removing high-volume, low-value tasks. For example, intelligent triage and process automation for incoming tickets or virtual assistants. The second involves AI-powered advanced analytics capabilities, including automating report creation, predictive analytics, risk analysis, and delivering process or service optimization insights.
These AI-enabled capabilities don’t replace the need for people as they are usually task-focused, not role-replacing. It’s people augmentation rather than replacement that makes for greater people efficiency and effectiveness. Implementing AI in ITSM (and other areas) will also create demand for specialist AI roles such as data analysts, automation specialists, and AI trainers.
Role skill requirements
The effect of AI on ITSM people skills is at least three-dimensional. First, your team could lack AI-related skills. For example, a service desk agent might not make the end-user handover from a chatbot as seamless as possible. Even though an AI-enabled capability might be considered intuitive, there still might be the need to change working practices and the associated skills to accommodate it.
Second, there could also be a need for AI-capability-specific skills. For example, a service desk agent might need training or education on fully benefiting from new AI-enabled capabilities. Without this, as with any new technology, its use is likely to be suboptimal. A good example is creating the prompts to gain the best responses from generative AI (GenAI) conversational capabilities.
Third, using AI-enable capabilities might negate the need for previously required knowledge, skills, and experience. For example, a service desk agent might have a resolution recommended to them by the AI and be offered a one-click resolution that requires no specialism on their part.
Role metrics
In the ITSM space, many of the metrics and targets employed have been stable for years. AI-enabled capabilities will change some of these. For service desk agents, for example, AI will remove simple tasks and speed up resolutions (as well as potentially improve experiences and reduce operational costs), affecting their personal-focused metrics and targets.
For instance, personal first-contact resolution (FCR) rates will likely plummet as the AI handles many of the simpler tickets, leaving the service desk agent with more complicated and time-consuming tickets. On the other hand, the personal average handling time (AHT) and cost per ticket will rise. These changes will need to be reflected in order to be both fair and motivational.
Employee well-being
Introducing AI-enabled capabilities will help ITSM staff and make their lives easier. However, there’s a “but” here. Your organization needs to understand how the use of AI, while helping ITSM staff, might also cause them issues without the management of the associated people change.
Again, using the service desk agent role as an example, the positives of AI adoption are that agents will feel empowered and offload their mundane tasks, reducing stress and improving job satisfaction. However, this is only one side of the proverbial coin. The change will motivate some agents because they will now work on more challenging tasks. In contrast, others might think their work is more difficult (because they’re now only handling trickier tasks).
In both instances, it’s important to appreciate that the change in the work profile might potentially present challenges to well-being.
Organizational culture
Finally, the cultural change AI adoption brings mustn’t be overlooked. For example, using AI-enabled capabilities might bring strategic changes to IT support policies and processes. Plus, there’s the aforementioned need to reconsider personal performance metrics in light of AI-enabled capabilities.
People must adjust to new processes and AI tool interactions, which might require a mindset shift. For example, the need for trust in AI capabilities is critical, with this facilitating additional AI adoption (which also requires senior-level backing and support). The ways of working will also differ in terms of interactions. ITSM staff might work less with others than previously, and sometimes, they might collaborate more. With the introduction of AI-enabled ITSM capabilities, so much will change, and the people-affecting aspects mustn’t be overlooked. If they are, as with any other technology change that lacks the necessary investment in organizational change management tools and techniques (to address the people change), the outcomes will likely be suboptimal. So, make the AI capabilities work better for your organization by ensuring that the potential people aspects are also considered and addressed where needed.