Change is the largest source of production issues. For organizations practicing DevOps, changes created through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can cause significant outages if they are not properly assessed. Here’s the reality IT teams are working with, and why they need a better way to accelerate change while predicting and managing risk across the enterprise:
- While organizations trust their DevOps pipeline, the unforeseen risks of introducing rapid change into complex environments, no matter how small, are anxiety-inducing for DevOps teams.
- When change occurs, organizations often lack visibility into and understanding of the change’s impact on the organization and its ecosystem.
- Both the change advisory board (CAB) and the DevOps practice of deploying changes lack real-time operational data for accurate risk assessment.
Introducing BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor: The new AI agent
The BMC Helix AIOps 25.1 release delivers on the promise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) for service management and operations (ServiceOps). The core element of ServiceOps is to accelerate change while predicting and managing risk. This is accomplished by integrating IT service management (ITSM) and AI for IT operations (AIOps) tools and data to automate change risk identification and prediction in a single pane of glass. Among the most exciting capabilities of agentic AI is its ability to interact with a wide variety of tools and data in different scenarios, generating insights, executing tasks, and recommending remediations in a proactive manner.
BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor is a new AI agent that guides change management and DevOps teams to implement system and software changes more rapidly and reliably. The AI agent identifies risky changes by analyzing operations and service management data together, summarizing the analysis, providing a change risk score, and recommending best actions. The AI agent investigates historical change data, the real-time deployment landscape, and additional context around the change. This enables change managers and DevOps teams to collaborate and apply better actions that reduce change failures.
Figure 1: BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor AI agent.
Use case for BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor
BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor can be a powerful agent for reducing outages caused by high-risk changes. For example, when predicting the change risk for a database upgrade, the AI agent can comb through past situations or problems and assess the current database service health. The AI agent generates a risk score, an automated summary of the risk, and recommended actions, which are all relayed to the change management or DevOps teams. If further due diligence is recommended, the agent’s analysis of the change risk can be used to support decision-making. With the agent’s assistance, change managers and DevOps teams get:
- Higher success rates by reducing change failures in dynamic systems
- Proactive change risk predictions for all changes
- Insights and recommendations throughout the entire change process
Reducing the change failure rate with BMC Helix
As systems grow more complex and interconnected, it becomes difficult to isolate changes, which increases the likelihood that a change in one area will cause unexpected issues elsewhere.
When it comes to reducing change failure rate, nothing is as impactful as getting your change risk prediction process right. BMC Helix ServiceOps provides a comprehensive solution to many of the problems we’ve discussed:
- AI agent: With BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor to interact with ITSM and AIOps data and workflows, the CAB and DevOps teams can accelerate change deployment without change anxiety.
- Change management: By using the change management capabilities of ITSM, the AI agent can correlate past changes and determine their impact on operational variables such as service availability and health.
- Observability: By utilizing BMC Helix observability and AIOps capabilities, the AI agent gains valuable insights into real-time system and service performance and health, enabling it to reliably predict change risk.
We’re continuing to optimize the change failure rate by catching unforeseen risks in real time. Whether through more integrated workflows or agent optimization to handle new variables and scenarios, each update aims to de-risk DevOps. To learn more about BMC HelixGPT Change Risk Advisor, book a demo here.
