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. Discovery is a critical component for integrating genAI into IT operations.

A strong solution will combine causal, predictive, and genAI to go beyond simply correlating incidents. It analyzes past root cause reports to uncover authentic causal links between past and current events. Using this information, the solution can provide a plain-language summary of the problem, with recommendations outlining how the same problems were solved in the past. As a result, IT practitioners can quickly understand the root cause to resolve issues much faster .

A genAI solution can process this vast ocean of dynamic data in real time to provide recommended next steps based on exactly what’s happening in the environment at that moment. And because genAI responds in a human-like way, users aren’t confused about what the next best action should be. Self-service also becomes far more effective, as users can explain the problem in their own words and, in many cases, get a response that addresses the issue. If the user encounters phrases or terms that they don’t understand, a quick follow-up question can rapidly provide a definition.

With BMC HelixGPT, which is part of the BMC Helix platform, CIOs and VPs of IT can empower their teams to break through the noise and rapidly identify root causes. It also provides IT practitioners with a resource that suggests solutions to resolve incidents quickly. The result is a far more efficient IT team that can significantly raise the bar for service, enabling IT to spend more time on more strategic work because they can quickly fix issues with genAI.

Interested in learning how BMC Helix can help your IT team run far more efficiently with generative AI? Experience it firsthand with a guided demo .