When IT leaders started telling Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™) more than a year ago that their personnel were using premium ChatGPT subscriptions to create device configs and automation scripts, we knew the industry was on the verge of a revolution. Given the extreme interest in generative AI (GenAI) and the billions of dollars being invested in the technology, EMA decided to investigate how enterprise IT organizations are applying the technology to IT operations tasks and processes today.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot IT industry buzzword for many years, particularly in the context of AIOps (AI for IT operations). AIOps is primarily the application of machine learning and other advanced algorithms to IT telemetry data for event correlation, anomaly detection, problem isolation, root-cause analysis, and other operational use cases. AIOps promised to streamline and automate various aspects of IT management, and it continues to gain momentum in the industry.
More recently, the emergence of ChatGPT from OpenAI kicked interest in AI into overdrive. ChatGPT and the countless competing platforms that followed it to market leverage large language models (LLM) to power generative AI, a technology that can produce new content in response to user prompts.
EMA spoke to many IT professionals who are successfully applying consumer-facing, general-purpose generative AI tools to IT operations tasks. The research aimed to uncover how these technologies can be effectively applied to IT management.
Some of the key findings from my new report, <span style="font-style: italic;">Applying Generative AI to IT Operations</span>, include:
■ Most IT professionals are using both general-purpose tools like ChatGPT and generative AI capabilities from their IT vendors.
■ The top challenges with applying generative AI to IT operations are validating quality of AI outputs, managing data quality, and integrating AI into tools and processes.
■ 93% believe it is at least somewhat important for their IT vendors to offer generative AI capabilities.
■ The two biggest potential benefits of applying generative AI to IT management tasks are the optimization of IT service performance and the improved alignment of IT with the business.