Generative AI’s role in increasing IT efficiency

CIOs and their IT teams — including operations/DevOps, site reliability engineering, and platform engineering — are charged with building and managing IT services that can provide near 100% uptime. When incidents do occur, they need to resolve them quickly. That’s a high bar, since a typical enterprise IT environment spans the cloud, edge, and hosted and on-premises data centers containing thousands of interdependent applications, all of which create millions of data points.

IT practitioners are bombarded with alerts, some of which are simply noise. When an incident occurs, these alerts can number in the hundreds. Making sense of this data deluge quickly is extremely difficult with traditional tools, especially when CIOs are constantly being asked to do more with less.

Thankfully, generative artificial intelligence (genAI) holds a lot of promise for increasing the efficiency of IT teams. GenAI can rapidly work through massive amounts of data to identify patterns that enable IT to quickly understand the root cause of an incident. Specifically, genAI can enable IT teams to:

• Find solutions with actionable recommendations. GenAI analyzes mountains of information – including monitoring tools, tickets, and even employee-generated content — to provide suggestions and guidance when resolving complex problems. As a result, IT teams can more quickly solve issues and get services back online.

• Identify root causes faster. GenAI combined with causal AI can identify relationships between past and current incidents to suggest a root cause. These insights go deeper than simple correlations to pinpoint true causal connections, which enables much more rapid problem-solving.

• Quickly access information via natural language. IT teams using genAI-powered search will deliver far more precise answers to questions. This enables them to resolve issues and get employees’ systems back up to speed faster, in turn increasing efficiency Additionally, genAI can provide situation summaries in natural language, which makes them easier to understand and act upon, especially for less experienced team members.

• Take advantage of intuitive virtual agents. In many cases, a genAI platform trained on the enterprise’s data — from telemetry data to knowledge base articles — can help individual employees, customers, and partners resolve IT issues all on their own. In fact, in some cases, genAI can take action to resolve issues, all of which frees up time for IT practitioners to focus on more complex problems.

Of course, while genAI can quickly make sense of large amounts of data, if that topology data doesn’t exist, genAI won’t be able to add value. .