PagerDuty today made generally available a set of generative artificial intelligence (AI) agents and capabilities that have been embedded into the PagerDuty Operations Cloud platform.
Jeffrey Hausman, chief product development officer at PagerDuty, said collective capabilities being added via a PagerDuty Advance module will make it easier for IT operations teams to resolve a range of issues faster by identifying how similar issues were previously resolved.
For example, IT teams will be able to invoke a generative AI chatbot that will provide relevant insights such as summaries tailored to the type of incident that has occurred. Those insights can then be used to auto-generate a runbook, created using natural language prompts. As additional IT staff are needed to resolve an issue, these tools will make it simpler to onboard new members to the incident management team, noted Hausman.
Additionally, IT teams can auto-generate an audience-specific status update draft in seconds to streamline communications with end users and, once the incident is resolved, generate a postmortem review, using a tool currently available via an early access program.
As IT service management (ITSM) continues to evolve, many of the manual tasks that today conspire to make working in IT tedious will be increasingly automated. The need for IT staff, however, is not likely to be diminished. Instead, as applications become simpler to build and manage, the overall size of the IT environment should exponentially increase. Generative AI tools should make it possible for existing IT operations teams to manage those applications at scale without having to dramatically increase headcount.
Of course, as many of the manual tasks performed today become automated, the role each member of an IT operations team plays will evolve. In many cases, IT teams will eventually find themselves orchestrating a series of AI agents trained to automate a specific task. Rather than performing tasks, many IT professionals will find themselves supervising a collection of AI agents that have been trained to perform them.
Lowering the Stress for IT Teams With AI
Ultimately, the overall stress level an IT team experiences today should be substantially less in the age of AI, noted Hausman.
Naturally, a change of this magnitude will have a significant impact on both the internal culture of IT teams and their relationship with the end users they serve. Many issues might be resolved without IT teams ever having to directly engage with an end user.
The one certain thing is at this point there is no going back. The only thing that remains to be seen is to what degree AI tools will live up to their promise. IT teams shouldn’t assume that AI tools are going to magically manage IT on an end-to-end basis. Outages that require the expertise of IT professionals to resolve are still going to happen, especially as IT environments become more complex. However, IT professionals who ignore AI will be doing so to the detriment of both themselves and the organizations that employ them.
