4 ways AI will change the ITOps landscape in 2024

After a tumultuous 2022, organizations were looking for a year of certitude and growth in 2023. Unfortunately, they didn’t get it. This was 12 months in which interest rates and inflation soared, and persistent business, economic, and geopolitical uncertainty weighed heavily on corporate strategy. Yet for IT operations teams little changed. Many struggled to support their organization’s expanding digital infrastructure with disjointed tooling and manual processes. Excessive workload, interruptions, and burnout remained all too common.

However, the emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) means the stage is set for the technology to disrupt the status quo in 2024. GenAI has the potential to transform digital operations, even as it introduces possible new risks and ethical quandaries. Those prepared to embrace the change with a robust plan for managing the risks will be best placed to take advantage.

1.     GenAI will supercharge productivity … and risk

GenAI burst into the mainstream thanks to the pioneering work of ChatGPT. However, the coming year will be a reality check for many organizations as the hard work of operationalizing the technology begins. GenAI could be a force multiplier for software engineering productivity and efficiency, but that could have unintended consequences. If developers also adopt GenAI, the result could be a surge in the volume of code shipped into ecosystems, which could result in more complexity, more demand, and more incidents.

Organizations that want to tap the undoubted benefits of GenAI without disrupting end users’ live streams or transactions will therefore need to invest in smarter ways to manage their digital infrastructure. That’s where AIOps comes in: enabling teams to reduce alert noise, accelerate triage, and automate manual work for fewer incidents and faster resolution.

We’ll also see more scrutiny placed on the GenAI providers themselves. Large language models (LLMs) are only as good as the data they leverage. That means developer-focused startups not affiliated with a major data source will fail to compete with offerings like GitHub Co-Pilot.

2.     GenAI will reshape architecture, processes, and automation

We’re about to see GenAI get interesting, as the technology moves from content summarization to reshaping the IT landscape. The best applications will not simply feed user input to back-end LLMs. Instead, they’ll use automated prompt engineering to enrich that input before calling the LLM, receiving the response, and then iterating with the model to derive more valuable results. This has the potential to drive a step-change in the sophistication of AIOps and the value digital ops teams can gain from intelligent automation.

The good news is that such capabilities should become more accessible in the coming year as large cloud infrastructure (IaaS) and software (SaaS) providers acquire LLM architecture companies. That will reduce the number of vendors an organization will need to interact with to build GenAI features.

3.     Retention will become the number one business objective

The past year may have seen a major leap forward in the AI revolution, but it’s important to remember that the technology’s foundation remains rooted in human input. Yes, it can supercharge the productivity of digital ops teams and others across the enterprise, when used correctly. But it won’t fundamentally alter the fact that the organization’s most valuable asset is its people. And that experience is a vital resource in high demand.

The recruitment and retention of exceptional talent will therefore continue to play a key role in driving value and enabling organizations to solve their customers’ most critical challenges. In 2024, retention of this talent will take precedence as the primary objective for many organizations. They must understand the key factors that can help them achieve this: whether it’s rewards packages, advancement opportunities, ESG commitments, or social impact initiatives.

But here’s where technology comes back into play. By automating repetitive tasks, intelligently routing work, and filtering out alert noise, organizations can free talent to focus on innovation-centric work. That will mean less firefighting, fewer out-of-hours interruptions, and happier staff.

4.     Organizations will need to “look around corners”

As AI takes hold in many organizations, it will be important not to lose sight of the ethical, legal, and compliance implications. This can have several dimensions, but the one that has been most explored is the impact of technology on product ethics and equity. AI is set to have such a profound impact on those who use and are affected by it, so much so that organizations must begin to take responsibility. It’s just one of many interrelated, systemic, and complex issues impacting businesses and their workforce in this digital age.

In 2024, executives and boards—with social impact and sustainability leaders at the forefront—must focus more effort on understanding and managing the potential impact of seemingly disparate and far-reaching issues. They will need to “look around corners” to head off the potential crises of tomorrow, today.

Agility will be key

The coming 12 months will certainly have its share of surprises in store. As always, what will separate successful businesses from the rest is the ability to adapt to these unplanned events. At an IT operations level, this means using intelligent automation to streamline and accelerate incident response—calling on valuable human expertise only when absolutely necessary. At a macro business level, it means having the agility to evolve and succeed no matter what the circumstances. AI can be the difference maker in both areas.

Learn more about PagerDuty’s recent findings on what 100 Fortune 1,000 executives think about genAI here.