The challenge:
The AI era puts traditional IT models to the test

Everything moves faster in the AI era, and the mounting technology complexity means it’s harder for IT service and IT operations organizations to keep up. As enterprises dial up investment in AI technologies and services, executive leadership is pressing for measurable business results to demonstrate ROI. At the same time, constant staff turnover and new delivery paradigms make it harder for IT to balance the mandate to maintain operational excellence while innovating and delivering value to the business. IT feels compelled to fast-track the release of new AI tools and services, but the accelerated delivery pace can spawn a host of operational and security problems that disrupt service and muddle visibility. Ensuing customer dissatisfaction creates barriers to AI adoption. The traditional model — where IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) function as separate businesses inside the same department — is not sustainable for the demands of this era. Outdated, manual procedures and technical debt keep IT service and operations teams working in silos, juggling different tools, data, and dashboards, with virtually no visibility into each other’s worlds. Ticket volumes keep climbing, alert noise overwhelms, and outages take longer to diagnose because the full picture is lacking.“Silos force IT organizations to be stuck reacting,” says Jay Perry, product marketing manager, ITSM, at ServiceNow. “Because there is no single source of truth, decisions get made on stale or incomplete data, which makes everything downstream slower and riskier.”AI has real potential to transform how IT service and IT operations work in concert to close the gaps and elevate service delivery. But random AI point solutions or AI pilot projects that are not aligned to specific business goals only drain budgets and diminish AI’s value. This guide is designed to help IT service and IT operations organizations make a strategic case for AI investments that will empower autonomous service operations and facilitate better outcomes.