Budget cuts hit, and hit hard sometimes. You might find yourself asking how your team can tighten the belt without sacrificing capabilities, then turn to your new “friend” artificial intelligence for help.
While IT professionals believe that automation and AI could reduce costs by using the tech for IT support and help desks, others like Brian Fox, co-founder and chief technology officer of Sonatype, point to the dangers.
“I think we need to be honest with ourselves that this all is new, and it can do some really cool stuff,” Fox said. “Where I would go is, how do I limit the damage, limit the scope of what these things can do? Maybe that means keeping some humans in the loop on some of these things and not just giving it free rein to take automatic actions.”
Let’s get automated. Others, like Nexthink Chief Technology Officer Vedant Sampath, believes there is an opportunity to reduce costs and improve overall experience for customers and employees through automating IT tickets, which means potentially reducing staff.
“Definitely, this is considered low-hanging fruit for them to…eliminate people, [and] all of the systems that you need to support them,” Sampath told IT Brew.
According to Sampath, IT’s support functions could be replaced with automation—specifically concerning employee and customer interactions that have to deal with service requests, resource questions, and infrastructure support.
Regarding ticket requests to IT teams, which he noted are often outsourced to managed service providers, Sampath said, “AI is ripe for replacing these sorts of simple requests. This isn’t the one where I really need to dig in, understand stuff.”
Justin Vianello, CEO at SkillStorm, agreed that help desks are going to be “subject to significant AI disruption moving forward.”
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“You’re absolutely still going to need people to be able to interact with the customers when the AI can’t answer the question or when they simply want to speak to a real person,” Vianello said. “But in terms of managing costs and reducing the number of people that are required for that work, I think we’re going to see a significant change in the next two to three years.”
Vianello said that this could drive more efficiency.
“Often, you’ll dial in to get some sort of customer support and you get sent around in circles,” Vianello said. “Rather than having a specifically trained AI agent.”
He continued: “I think it’s gonna lead to lower costs and I think it’s gonna lead to better outcomes for everybody.”
The danger zone. Fox said that because companies are looking to roll out AI quickly to save money, its hasty deployment will most likely be at the heart of a CrowdStrike-level outage.
“We’re building a house of cards,” Fox told IT Brew.
Fox said that companies are rolling out AI because “it can do things faster, cheaper, and in some cases, it can do things that a human just can’t do.”
“We’re in such a rush to roll these things out, to recognize the speed, performance, and scale and all the things means people are much more aggressive,” Fox said. “There’s that fear of being left out in the AI gold rush. It creates the perfect storm of, ‘We’re heavily motivated to just forget the learnings of the past,’ but I think the impacts could be much larger.”