Key Findings & Highlights:

Cognitive IT infrastructure management services are facilitating the transition to next-generation IT infrastructure and workplace services, driven by a requirement to reduce costs, improve business and IT infrastructure continuity, agility, and productivity while aligning metrics to business outcomes.

Key requirements in the transition to next-generation IT infrastructure and workplace include the use of AI, cognitive, machine learning, NLP, intelligent automation and virtual agents to help manage the increasing complexity of the IT environment, and improving infrastructure and applications performance and availability, creating an ‘always on’ IT environment.

Key services being adopted include advanced analytics to further mine operational data, deploying machine learning algorithms; also using autonomics, RPA, and intelligent bots to automatically diagnose and resolve incidents, through AI based auto resolution and remediation. Also, predictive maintenance is being used to anticipate failures before they happen, and using self-heal solutions.

Across workplace services, self-serve capabilities are being deployed, including the use of chatbots and virtual assistants for basic use cases, in addition to the use of proactive and predictive analytics, and automated provisioning through ITSM (ServiceNow) to improve the overall end-user experience.

Most clients are deploying proof-of-concept pilots (POC), and projects to understand the investment required and benefits of adopting AI and cognitive services.

To deliver these services, IT service vendors are investing in capabilities including:

• Analytics and machine learning
• Cognitive-based predictive maintenance
• Self-healing and autonomous remediation
• Intelligent automation
• Cognitive virtual agents.

IT services vendors are also using third-party tools in support of automation, self-heal, and end-user experience.