AI now has a significant and growing role to play in driving predictability and proactivity across the IT ecosystem, enhancing the experience, expediting re-skilling, and improving business outcomes. This is resulting in:

• Greater focus on cognitive consulting and advisory services, including AI-powered OCM to drive adoption and ROI
• Increasing investment in GenAI and Agentic AI to support cognitive IT infrastructure and digital workplace services
• Demand for SRE-led operations and holistic experience.

NelsonHall’s recently completed analysis of cognitive & self-healing IT infrastructure management services, plus early findings from our latest digital workplace services project (due to be published in October) point to a marked increase in the use of GenAI and Agentic AI to augment agents, improve UX and EX, and enable re-skilling of resources. This blog examines the investments vendors need to make to meet client demand and how the market is expected to evolve over the next 12 to 18 months.

Cognitive consulting and advisory services driving adoption

All vendors are focusing on a cognitive consulting and advisory-led approach to expedite their AI transformation strategies, which includes greater emphasis on AI-enabled OCM. For example, TCS, through its Cognix for Agile Infrastructure capabilities, offers a maturity assessment with 45 KPIs and 275 solutions to enhance the maturity levels of infrastructure. Similarly, DXC Technology provides industry-specific GenAI consulting. For example, in the automotive sector, it offers advisory services for software-defined vehicles, which include collecting data and transferring it from the edge to data hubs, as well as running AI workloads on petabytes of data daily.

Another key focus is AI as a service, where clients seek assistance with AIOps and its benefits, including setting up AI foundations and managing the change from a development and overall consumption standpoint. In addition, Infosys is helping clients develop strategies and business cases before the RFP, including people strategy, M&A, licensing and optimization, sustainability, and workplace transformation.

Clients particularly need help in driving productivity and ROI, including license optimization across AI tools such as Microsoft 365 Copilot. NTT DATA, for example, provides Copilot for Microsoft 365 advisory workshops and targeted OCM delivery, focusing on employee engagement, learning, and development, including a Copilot CoE. Similarly, DXC Technology is establishing Copilot CoEs and training Copilot champions, enabling use case registration and adoption.

Over the next 12 months, vendors will focus on persona-based, AI-enabled OCM to drive the adoption of GenAI, including Microsoft Copilot for M365, GitHub Copilot, and Agentic AI capabilities. This includes device analytics, sentiment insights, and UX scores in a single dashboard, informing training approaches by persona and technology adoption rates across toolsets.

Increasing investment in AIOps, GenAI, and Agentic AI for cognitive IT infrastructure and digital workplace services

Vendor investment in AIOps continues to support full-stack monitoring and observability, as well as self-healing IT estates on-premise and in the cloud, through a modular, plug-and-play approach. In addition, there will be increased utilization of AI Copilots to enhance engineers’ efficiency through AIOps incident prediction and remote support via a command center approach, providing technical support directly from the end-user’s smartphone camera. This further supports ESG initiatives through a reduction in the carbon footprint as engineers travel less. GenAI augmentation also enables upskilling; for example, TCS empowers L1 agents to resolve L2 issues through data center assistance (with GenAI knowledge retrieval and insights for data center-related user queries).

We expect to see more traction for GitHub Copilot for legacy code modernization. Here, Kyndryl has utilized various languages, achieving 40-70% savings in development efficiency, and across digital workplace services, leveraging it to generate self-healing scripts.

There will be increased investment in private AI, including the NVIDIA stack for on-premise GenAI.  For example, Infosys helps clients set up NVIDIA DGX Cloud, providing a tested and certified blueprint that is deployed and managed as either a hosted or on-premise model. Elsewhere, DXC Technology is standardizing NVIDIA technology to enable infrastructure for clients to run AI/GenAI projects, and TCS provides HPE Private Cloud AI with embedded NVIDIA AI capabilities.

We also expect to see an expansion of small language models to meet industry and client-specific requirements, tailored to each client's data. Here, Unisys has further developed its Service Experience Accelerator (SEA) technology framework to enable a safe and secure transition to a GenAI-led environment with the required attributes. It incorporates custom GenAI and ML capabilities, with Unisys providing orchestration through its own GenAI learning models, and API integration into client and third-party tools. A key element is that it is optimized to run in-tenant, effectively running inside a client's data sovereignty boundaries.

Another key investment area includes Agentic AI, where NTT DATA has launched its Workplace Agentic AI Suite powered by its Smart AI Agent. It offers end-to-end and full-stack capabilities, including AI agents, platforms, third-party integrations, and management services. It has developed several Agentic AI use cases, driving, for example, the adoption of Copilot, E3, E5, Power Platform, and AVD. Meanwhile, DXC Technology is investing in Agentic AI through AI-powered Copilots and agents, predictive and self-healing support, and Uptime Digital Assistant. Infosys is enabling AI-first collaboration with Copilot offerings, AI-led intranet modernization, intelligent knowledge networks, apps, and agents.

There is also a greater focus on developing Agentic AI functional use cases (e.g., HRSD) with ServiceNow and Copilot extensibility services across the enterprise. TCS, for example, offers M365 Copilot extensibility services, including an NLP-powered extension for a smart agent and a knowledge master that enables multilingual contextual search experiences.

Also, vendors are providing orchestration of Copilot services through a bot-of-bots approach. Additionally, there is a greater focus on Agentic AI frameworks, enabling citizen developers to create agentic workflows and use cases. For example, Compucom is incentivising its employees through low-code/no-code tools to identify tasks to agentify across their respective business functions.

Demand for SRE-led operations and holistic experience increases

Vendors are expanding dedicated SRE and DevSecOps practices and resources, as well as implementing an SRE-led approach to operations and full-stack observability capabilities. Vendor examples include:

• Infosys provides a structured framework to enable clients to progress towards SRE-based operations and reduce operational toil with an automation-first approach
• Wipro is infusing GenAI across its FullStride platforms, including the enablement of an SRE, NoOps-based model to enable client applications and platforms
• TCS, through its experience elevation center, is enacting an SRE-led approach with observability, NOC, and SOC teams, minimizing the need to contact IT and monitor UX
• DXC Technology is expanding CloudOps (SRE), DevSecOps, and agile delivery approach across cloud operations
• NTT DATA is integrating the SRE model with workplace experience centered on Agentic AI, making it the single interface for all user interactions across the enterprise.

Outlook

Investment in cognitive and self-healing IT infrastructure management, as well as digital workplace services, will continue to be dominated by AI investments. This includes a greater focus on personas and industry-specific requirements, as well as engineer empowerment through GenAI-enabled services. Additionally, there will be greater utilization of Agentic AI to enhance agent and employee productivity, along with a stronger focus on functional use cases and Copilot extensibility across the enterprise (e.g., HRSD with ServiceNow).

There will also be a greater focus on DEM to drive a holistic experience across the enterprise and measure the total experience, augmented by AI and EXaaS. Here, vendors need to expand their AI platforms orchestration, AI-enabled monitoring, SRE frameworks, and AI-enabled OCM.