“CIO Perspectives” is a white paper series by Mark Settle that explores top-of-mind technical issues confronting today’s CIOs and IT leaders. Mark is a seven-time CIO, a three-time CIO 100 award winner, and a two-time book author. His most recent book is Truth from the Valley, A Practical Primer on IT Management for the Next Decade.
Although often dismissed as a necessary evil by corporate employees, the IT service desk plays a critical role in establishing the technical and business credibility of every IT organization.
Conventional desk operations are intrinsically reactive in nature, responding to employee-reported concerns and system-generated alerts. Generative AI technology is currently being used to automate responses to common employee issues through self-service mechanisms that eliminate the need for direct interaction with human desk agents.
AI technology holds even greater promise as a means of reimaging conventional operations in their entirety, switching from a reactive model that seeks to resolve reported issues as quickly as possible to a proactive model that prevents incidents altogether or remediates them at their earliest stages of emergence before they have any appreciable employee impact.
Conventional desks have been unable to adopt proactive operating models in the past simply because they lack the staffing and technical competence to do so. Generative AI eliminates those constraints. AI agents are capable of continuously monitoring IT systems, identifying conditions that have triggered incidents in the past, and detecting emerging incidents. There are no limitations on the number or variety of such agents, their access to relevant technical
information or their real time availability.
The proactive service desk envisioned in this white paper unites the ‘shift left’ thinking that has revolutionized software development with the multi-agent AI architectures currently under development to radically transform service desk operations. The goal of such desks is to anticipate and neutralize threats to employee productivity in much the same ways that security teams seek to neutralize cyber threats before internal company operations are jeopardized.
