With the constant influx of product innovation, news, and user case studies shared about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in the past 12 months, it deserves to be named “Technology of the Year” for 2024.
GenAI is only just beginning to realize its full potential, according to a recent study conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of BMC. When coupled with agentic AI, which can take autonomous actions, GenAI can help enterprise IT teams transform their approach to IT operations and service management in 2025.
Our main goal of the recent study was to take the pulse of GenAI and agentic AI use across organizations of varying sizes and industries. We polled 424 global IT practitioners and decision-makers and realized most of them have already incorporated GenAI into their strategic operations and service management plans.
According to our findings, we are in the early stages of GenAI adoption, with 83 percent of respondents pointing to pilot projects and experimentation with standalone solutions, such as chatbots and simple use cases. Despite early stages, the majority of organizations surveyed anticipate achieving high-value returns on their investment in GenAI and agentic AI.
GenAI helps IT organizations do more
According to our research, the growth of IT organizations is far outpaced by the growth of the data, infrastructure, and applications enterprise IT teams are expected to manage. Using GenAI and agentic AI is a promising approach to bridge this gap.
Agentic AI is composed of autonomous agents that use advanced reasoning to take independent action, adapt in real time, and solve multi-step problems. It works alongside human experts to improve IT organizations’ productivity, user experience, and service reliability, delivering benefits that include reduced troubleshooting time and better data analysis. These agents go beyond the “call and response” mechanism, performing actions such as:
- Knowledge curation: Updating and maintaining knowledge bases.
- Proactive, in-context insights: Providing faster, real-time data analysis and best action recommendations.
- Change risk advisory: Understanding and mitigating the impact of service changes.
More than two-thirds (68 percent) of respondents are using GenAI for chatbots, which are popular for automating customer service and reducing the number of Level 1 tickets that human support agents must manage. This allows IT teams to focus on higher-level more complex issues.
The survey also revealed that the majority of IT organizations are using more than one GenAI provider and are experimenting with between three and five use cases, while more mature organizations are piloting eight or more use cases. Of those respondents with successful GenAI use cases in production, respondents are already seeing the benefits of their GenAI applications.
- Reduced manual work: 46 percent reported less need for manual investigative work, such as data correlation, to identify root causes and system impacts.
- Increased productivity: 41 percent noted higher IT team productivity.
- Accessible information: 34 percent found more accessible, human-readable information, such as log data which helps IT teams resolve issues faster and onboard new team members easier.
High hopes for GenAI and agentic AI for IT organizations
GenAI and agentic AI are poised for even more success, according to survey respondents. More than half of organizations that have GenAI projects in process expect them to yield high value, while only one percent or less across all groups believe the technology will have a negative impact.
Nearly all of respondents have tasks they would like to see performed by AI so they can focus on other priorities. For example:
- System performance analysis: 54 percent want AI to detect issues and optimize performance.
- IT operations tasks: 52 percent would like AI to handle root-cause analysis and incident routing.
- IT service management: 51 percent would delegate Level 1 support requests and incidents to AI.
- Vulnerability management: 49 percent want AI to detect, prioritize, and resolve vulnerabilities.
The positive outlook IT practitioners have toward GenAI, and agentic AI is reflected in the number of future use cases they hope to apply AI to, such as:
- Proactive problem management: 50 percent want to see GenAI and agentic AI used to proactively manage recurring incident resolution.
- Incident management: 47 percent want to use GenAI and agentic AI to manage incidents by rapidly analyzing data, identifying root causes to quickly resolve critical service disruptions.
- Automated vulnerability risk resolution: 43 percent expect that agentic AI will automatically alleviate the risk of vulnerabilities and resolve the most critical ones first.
Common challenges with GenAI
Our study also revealed the most common challenges IT practitioners encounter with GenAI and agentic AI adoption. As these technologies are in the early adopter stage for many, we believe the challenges will become more manageable, particularly with training and the deployment of innovative solutions developed to address them.
Almost half of our respondents reported that they are struggling to manage the volume of data across multiple repositories, making it difficult to ensure quality data is collected, normalized, cleansed, and correlated. And 35 percent cited that lack of integration across GenAI tools, workflows, and data, would negatively affect the GenAI effectiveness.
In terms of cultural issues, 43 percent of those surveyed pointed to a lack of understanding from business stakeholders and 35 percent cited a lack of time and resources to gain the necessary expertise for proper GenAI and agentic AI implementation.
Despite these challenges, a vast majority of respondents believe that GenAI automation is best used across functional areas in an enterprise, such as IT operations, security, and service management.
BMC’s GenAI and agentic AI: Transforming enterprise IT work
We are embracing GenAI across our BMC Helix platform, innovating with agentic AI to reduce the workload on IT practitioners and deliver IT services more efficiently.
BMC HelixGPT is a GenAI toolset built into the BMC Helix platform, offering true agentic AI functionality. It provides a set of autonomous AI agents that transform enterprise IT work, making it easier for IT teams to troubleshoot faster, predict and prevent incidents, and get the insights they need, even when information is spread across multiple repositories.
BMC HelixGPT simplifies data access, improves productivity, and enhances the user experience through conversational interfaces and proactive insights, supporting intelligent IT operations and service management. The goal is to equip IT organizations with personal digital assistants that change how they interact with networks, systems, and applications and conduct IT work.
For more detailed findings and additional recommendations around whether your organization should invest in and explore GenAI and agentic technologies, read the full report and see our webinar, where we share the full results and recommendations.
These postings are my own and do not necessarily represent BMC's position, strategies, or opinion.
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