The enterprise service revolution: Supercharging ESM with AI

IT service management (ITSM) tools and practices transformed the tech side of the enterprise by automating service and support operations, along with adding employee self-service options. The combination was so effective that organizations are applying the principles to the entire organization in the form of enterprise service management (ESM), allowing departments such as human resources (HR), finance, and facilities to transform their own processes.

The approach can, for example:

• Help HR departments to standardize and automate employee onboarding
• Allow finance teams to reduce manual work while increasing quality and accuracy
• Enable legal teams to track and accelerate document submissions and reviews

ESM is now rapidly becoming more transformative with the incorporation of generative artificial intelligence (genAI) and agentic AI.

Thanks to the November 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, many people are familiar with genAI’s ability to perform specific tasks on request. Users can prompt a genAI model, for example, to write an email, summarize a lengthy document, or create an image, and a genAI tool responds based on the user’s prompt.

Agentic AI is more autonomous, capable of initiating and performing tasks on its own, such as analyzing data, making recommendations, and carrying out automated processes with minimal oversight.

How AI enhances ESM

Both genAI and agentic AI add powerful capabilities across IT and business processes throughout the enterprise, making it easier for employees to find and access the resources they need.

Consider when an employee needs to initiate a change of address or request a leave of absence with HR. Traditionally, the individual would search for the right document from a knowledge base or HR portal to find the information they need. That might require opening, reading, and searching several different documents to find the right answers. An ESM solution with genAI enables a simple query – such as “What is the process for requesting a leave of absence?” – to launch a chatbot that will not only summarize the process, but also present the correct form to the employee and even pre-populate some of the entries.

By simplifying the process and summarizing from up-to-date documents, genAI saves time and effort, delivering fast responses to employees.

Agentic AI takes simplicity and automation a step further. An HR manager, for example, could instruct an agentic AI model within their ESM system to ensure the knowledge base for specific policy documents remains current, updating documents as new information and policies arise, and notifying approvers as needed. The technology can also act as a curator, flagging or even replacing old, duplicate, or expired articles to keep the knowledge base fresh.

Another example: An employee notices a spill of an unknown fluid on the floor. The individual could send a picture to an AI agent, which analyzes the location, potential sources of the leak, and any identifying characteristics of the fluid. If the contents are potentially hazardous, the AI agent could then automatically alert relevant facilities teams, initiating the cleanup process and mitigating safety concerns.

Agentic AI can also optimize automated processes by analyzing service and request fulfillment performance data to recommend areas of process improvement across departments, further optimizing service delivery across the organization.

Elevate your ESM experience

With the latest enhancements of genAI and agentic AI in the BMC Helix ESM solution, BMC delivers more robust ESM outcomes, elevating service quality and speed across departments. Enhanced self-service, conversational interfaces, and AI-powered automation are now core to the modern ESM experience, helping organizations drive efficiency, responsiveness, and better employee experiences across every department.

Delve deeper into the ways that AI is upleveling ESM. Visit here for more information or contact BMC.