BMC Software revealed this week during its Connect 2024 conference that it has added artificial intelligence (AI) agents trained using large language models (LLMs) to its IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations management (ITOM) platforms.
Margaret Lee, senior vice president and general manager for digital service and operations management at BMC, told conference attendees that there will soon be a fleet of generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents that have been specifically trained to handle tasks such as keeping knowledge articles up to date.
The overall goal is to reduce the level of toil that IT operations teams face today by automating many of the manual tasks that make IT teams less productive, she added.
Originally launched in 2019, the Helix ITSM platform is now at the core of BMC Helix, an independent company that BMC will create in 2025 to focus resources on the Helix platform, while the rest of the BMC automation platforms and frameworks will continue to be advanced by BMC.
Steven Dickens, a chief technology advisor for The Futurum Group, said that approach will enable both organizations to not only focus resources but also more flexibly pursue third-party alliances as needed.
It’s not clear to what degree privately held BMC, which is owned by the investment firm KKR, intends to sell its stake in BMC Helix, but the overall goal is to ensure the Helix ITSM platform continues to drive an integrated service operations framework that BMC launched in 2022.
BMC Helix is making it simpler to manage IT as a set of services no matter how they were created or managed, noted Lee. That approach makes it possible for IT organizations to embrace automation regardless of what level of IT maturity any organization might have achieved, she noted.
Over the last several years BMC has been steadily infusing multiple types of AI models into the Helix ITSM platform. Agentic AI, which takes advantage of the reasoning capabilities of language models to automate specific tasks, is the next logical step in what has become a series of AI advances. Those capabilities, however, don’t necessarily eliminate the need for an orchestration framework to coordinate tasks being performed by AI agents that are working alongside IT managers that supervise the overall workflow.
It’s not likely the rise of agentic AI is going to replace the need for IT administrators, but the job functions and roles are changing. In fact, there may soon come a day when IT administrators are not going to want to work for organizations that don’t provide them with access to AI tools. After all, there is a significant amount of drudgery that IT professionals regularly encounter that could be automated using AI agents. In fact, many organizations might be able to deploy more applications if they don’t have to hire additional staff.
One way or another, the management of IT is becoming more automated. The only thing left to determine is the degree. Early on, the tasks that might be handled by an AI agent are fairly routine. There will, of course, come a day when the reasoning capabilities of AI agents that have been trained to perform a specific set of tasks will become more advanced. Rather than viewing that as a threat to their careers, many IT administrators are more likely to view AI agents as a set of personal assistants that, theoretically, respond to their every wish and command.
