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Why Artificial Intelligence Isn't Just a Buzzword for IT Departments

Tim Flower

Imagine this: after a fantastic night's sleep, you walk into the office ready to attack the day. Everything seems to be going your way — your commute went faster than expected, your morning coffee was perfect, and you have some great ideas to add to an important customer presentation you're giving that afternoon. You sit down at your desk ready to go, and your computer starts acting up.

You reboot, because that's what the help desk will tell you to do. But it doesn't help, and suddenly you're overcome with frustration, fear and anxiety all at once. You take a deep breath, clear your head, and call the help desk who you are sure will get you up and running in no time (fingers crossed). However, they tell you that a lot of people are having similar issues and all IT can do is create a ticket for you and transfer it to another team to help you as soon as possible. Now the real panic sets in, and your perfect day just came crashing down.

While this may seem like an example of the perfect storm, the reality is that end users around the world experience similar situations every day. CIOs and IT leaders recognize how an overwhelmed IT staff can have a significantly negative impact on the business with delayed solutions and, in many cases, being the cause of the problems. With so many strategic goals competing for priority, they aren't quite sure where to start, and maintaining IT stability shouldn't be competing for the top slot. Below are three tips to help CIOs and IT leaders improve user productivity and ease the burden on the help desk while maintaining focus on the larger company-wide strategic goals.

IT is Employee Experience

Don't focus on incident tickets – Pay attention to the user experience instead.

In today's digitally-dependent workforce, employees rely on different devices and applications to do their jobs effectively. And there's nothing more frustrating to an employee than calling the help desk to open a ticket to fix an issue and having to wait an extended period of time for a resolution. When IT issues drag out over the course of days or weeks, employee productivity and overall morale drops while the cost of doing business and revenue loss both increase.

With this in mind, business leaders are reacting accordingly. As an example, a recent study conducted by Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ) found that 41 percent of organizations that are taking a proactive approach to IT — by empowering both employees and IT staff to be more collaborative — improved success rates in preventing performance issues before employees were ever affected.

The study also found that these enterprises are enjoying greater IT success when they shift to monitoring IT services from the end-user perspective with proper business context, and 58 percent of the survey's respondents noted that monitoring IT performance from the user perspective is a top strategic goal for their IT transformation in 2018.

Simply put, organizations that can proactively keep tabs on their enterprise environments and the efforts of IT, along with receiving regular employee feedback about those efforts, are likely to maintain successful IT departments — while preserving (or even increasing) employee productivity by cutting down the number of issues they deal with. The opportunity with this approach is clear, but the challenge for business leaders becomes — how do we get there?

Using AI to Empower IT Staff and Employees

Use advanced capabilities to extract vast amounts of insight from these small PC devices.

Strategic-thinking CIOs and their IT departments are choosing to use advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to comprehensively monitor and assess the user experience of devices and applications across the enterprise in real-time. Leveraging the power of advanced algorithms, companies can take a more advanced approach to IT by using end-user performance data to identify IT-related problems automatically and generate associated IT tickets. In addition, the right AI-based tools can remediate minor issues as they pop up without any human intervention at all — freeing IT staff to tend to only the most pressing concerns, or better yet — more strategic and value-add assignments.

This allows IT staff to stay ahead of different hiccups with devices and applications companywide by giving them the context needed to make the best decisions possible and remediate issues quickly (sometimes automatically) and with ease.

Taking a Proactive Approach to IT

Remove your end users as a critical step in your IT support process.

When an IT department makes the leap and takes a truly proactive approach to IT, the result for the organization is a vastly more efficient IT staff and a group of employees that aren't inconvenienced when IT-related problems arise. And employees have a job to do; notifying IT about issues shouldn't be one of them.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can sift through data and find issues faster than a human could ever hope to, which is why successful organizations are choosing to add AI into the mix to bolster the abilities of their IT staff and take the end-user out of the process. By letting the algorithms do what they're best at, businesses can reduce the overall number of IT support tickets, eliminate employee frustration related to IT disruptions and most importantly, ensure employees across every department have devices and applications consistently available so they can do their jobs effectively.

When IT departments are empowered to be champions of the employee experience and given the tools to succeed, amazing things can happen in the organization. I have seen first-hand how greater employee productivity leads to reduced operational IT spending because teams are able to focus on the most pressing concerns, as opposed to being bogged down with support tickets and placing employee issues in a queue to be dealt with later.

Automation, though still relatively new for business applications, has the power to bolster the abilities of IT staff across the world if the right dynamic is implemented. With the power of AI at the fingertips of IT departments, they'll elevate their service levels to new heights and, more importantly, significantly decrease your chances of the perfect start to your work day being derailed simply because your computer started acting up.

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

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From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

Why Artificial Intelligence Isn't Just a Buzzword for IT Departments

Tim Flower

Imagine this: after a fantastic night's sleep, you walk into the office ready to attack the day. Everything seems to be going your way — your commute went faster than expected, your morning coffee was perfect, and you have some great ideas to add to an important customer presentation you're giving that afternoon. You sit down at your desk ready to go, and your computer starts acting up.

You reboot, because that's what the help desk will tell you to do. But it doesn't help, and suddenly you're overcome with frustration, fear and anxiety all at once. You take a deep breath, clear your head, and call the help desk who you are sure will get you up and running in no time (fingers crossed). However, they tell you that a lot of people are having similar issues and all IT can do is create a ticket for you and transfer it to another team to help you as soon as possible. Now the real panic sets in, and your perfect day just came crashing down.

While this may seem like an example of the perfect storm, the reality is that end users around the world experience similar situations every day. CIOs and IT leaders recognize how an overwhelmed IT staff can have a significantly negative impact on the business with delayed solutions and, in many cases, being the cause of the problems. With so many strategic goals competing for priority, they aren't quite sure where to start, and maintaining IT stability shouldn't be competing for the top slot. Below are three tips to help CIOs and IT leaders improve user productivity and ease the burden on the help desk while maintaining focus on the larger company-wide strategic goals.

IT is Employee Experience

Don't focus on incident tickets – Pay attention to the user experience instead.

In today's digitally-dependent workforce, employees rely on different devices and applications to do their jobs effectively. And there's nothing more frustrating to an employee than calling the help desk to open a ticket to fix an issue and having to wait an extended period of time for a resolution. When IT issues drag out over the course of days or weeks, employee productivity and overall morale drops while the cost of doing business and revenue loss both increase.

With this in mind, business leaders are reacting accordingly. As an example, a recent study conducted by Digital Enterprise Journal (DEJ) found that 41 percent of organizations that are taking a proactive approach to IT — by empowering both employees and IT staff to be more collaborative — improved success rates in preventing performance issues before employees were ever affected.

The study also found that these enterprises are enjoying greater IT success when they shift to monitoring IT services from the end-user perspective with proper business context, and 58 percent of the survey's respondents noted that monitoring IT performance from the user perspective is a top strategic goal for their IT transformation in 2018.

Simply put, organizations that can proactively keep tabs on their enterprise environments and the efforts of IT, along with receiving regular employee feedback about those efforts, are likely to maintain successful IT departments — while preserving (or even increasing) employee productivity by cutting down the number of issues they deal with. The opportunity with this approach is clear, but the challenge for business leaders becomes — how do we get there?

Using AI to Empower IT Staff and Employees

Use advanced capabilities to extract vast amounts of insight from these small PC devices.

Strategic-thinking CIOs and their IT departments are choosing to use advanced analytics and artificial intelligence to comprehensively monitor and assess the user experience of devices and applications across the enterprise in real-time. Leveraging the power of advanced algorithms, companies can take a more advanced approach to IT by using end-user performance data to identify IT-related problems automatically and generate associated IT tickets. In addition, the right AI-based tools can remediate minor issues as they pop up without any human intervention at all — freeing IT staff to tend to only the most pressing concerns, or better yet — more strategic and value-add assignments.

This allows IT staff to stay ahead of different hiccups with devices and applications companywide by giving them the context needed to make the best decisions possible and remediate issues quickly (sometimes automatically) and with ease.

Taking a Proactive Approach to IT

Remove your end users as a critical step in your IT support process.

When an IT department makes the leap and takes a truly proactive approach to IT, the result for the organization is a vastly more efficient IT staff and a group of employees that aren't inconvenienced when IT-related problems arise. And employees have a job to do; notifying IT about issues shouldn't be one of them.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can sift through data and find issues faster than a human could ever hope to, which is why successful organizations are choosing to add AI into the mix to bolster the abilities of their IT staff and take the end-user out of the process. By letting the algorithms do what they're best at, businesses can reduce the overall number of IT support tickets, eliminate employee frustration related to IT disruptions and most importantly, ensure employees across every department have devices and applications consistently available so they can do their jobs effectively.

When IT departments are empowered to be champions of the employee experience and given the tools to succeed, amazing things can happen in the organization. I have seen first-hand how greater employee productivity leads to reduced operational IT spending because teams are able to focus on the most pressing concerns, as opposed to being bogged down with support tickets and placing employee issues in a queue to be dealt with later.

Automation, though still relatively new for business applications, has the power to bolster the abilities of IT staff across the world if the right dynamic is implemented. With the power of AI at the fingertips of IT departments, they'll elevate their service levels to new heights and, more importantly, significantly decrease your chances of the perfect start to your work day being derailed simply because your computer started acting up.

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...