Reset the economics of enterprise IT with agentic AI

At a time when many business leaders are starting to scrutinize artificial intelligence (AI) spending, BMC Helix is focused on how to deliver measurable, meaningful cost savings with AI agents that streamline ServiceOps, the convergence of service management and operations management.

At the BMC Helix Roadshow in New York City in November, Ali Siddiqui, president and CEO of BMC Helix, noted that leaders still believe they need to invest in AI to compete. “Increasingly, however, their executive teams also expect them to be able to show value,” he said. 

Ryan Manning, chief product officer of BMC Helix, laid out a specific example of how customers are resetting IT economics with AI agents: service disruptions. Just one priority 1 (P1) service disruption costs an average of $122,000 in direct labor costs, plus two to five times that amount in business impact, he said — and many companies have 10+ disruptions each year. With Ops Swarmer, one of approximately 30 multiskill AI agents from BMC Helix, organizations could bring their annual disruption-related costs down by an average of $2.6 million by reducing the number of disruptions and making responses more efficient. 

How agents power IT productivity

Ops Swarmer helps orchestrate incident response, by pulling relevant data from multiple tools and responding to real-time employee queries within Microsoft Teams. On the front end, Employee Navigator, another BMC Helix agent integrated into Teams, provides employee self-service through natural-language queries for IT, human resources, and facilities requests — eliminating the need to go into dedicated service portals. 

BMC Helix calls the integration with Teams an “antiplatform” approach. Manning emphasized, “We’re not introducing a new application to solve the problem. We’re grabbing hold of these other platforms, working with your choice of LLM [large language model] and alongside existing systems and presenting the insights in Teams. It’s the epitome of the antiplatform for IT and will help reduce the distractions associated with context switching. After all, the best UI [user interface] is no UI.” 

Vodafone, a longtime BMC Helix customer, is testing Employee Navigator. Heather Gilbank, principal product manager for IT service operations at Vodafone, says the AI agent is helping Vodafone tap into the vast quantities of data currently locked inside individual service tickets. “We’re pulling that resolution information out so every single process can absorb the data in the tickets and the tools,” she says.

Taking things a step further, the BMC Helix CFO Dashboard shows the total time and money organizations save by using AI agents across all tasks, enabling companies to compare the cost of AI with the tangible benefits they receive. Customers, Manning says, are largely looking at using AI agents to empower their employees — not replace them.

“I know that some people think AI is synonymous with layoffs,” Manning says, “but that’s not where we’re headed. AI is a workforce multiplier: Now’s your chance for pie-in-the-sky projects that were too expensive or unrealistic before. It comes down to reshaping the roles of technology and the traditional workforce, resetting the economics of enterprise IT.”

For more information, visit helixops.ai.