Buying a waterproof coat when it is raining is similar to getting drenched for a few days and then falling sick. Until you realize the necessity of a remedy, there are so many days of suffering. Isn’t it?

We can refer to this as a reactive mindset ─ yes, getting prepared just when the problem arrives.

On the IT service management side, a service desk with a break/fix model, which is also known as reactive IT support, can experience a similar fate to that of a person without a waterproof coat in the rain.

A break/fix IT support model has many downsides rather than advantages. In this particular setting, an on-call IT responder addresses issues only when a ticket is raised. Though a calculated service desk risk exists in terms of prolonged downtime, productivity drains, and employee burnout, they translate into everyday problems ─ yet some companies still continue to have a similar approach year after year.

Proactive service is always desirable from a user’s end. According to Microsoft, 68% of customers view brands that offer proactive customer service notifications as favorable. This isn’t different from what a user expects from a proactive service desk.

Though Gartner estimates only 30% of customer service and support will adopt a proactive approach by 2023, in the age of GPT 3.5 or even bigger, GPT 4, a service desk, could be more advanced and more brilliant, driving IT leaders to apply Generative AI on top of their service desk and gain proactive advantages.

Implementing the right tool, such as the Workativ conversational AI platform, lets you unleash the immense benefits of Generative AI for service desk transformation. (We will uncover more later in this article)

Let’s uncover how generative AI can usher service desk to become more proactive IT support.

Simply put, proactive IT support means adequate preparedness with the necessary resources and tools to mitigate the impact of downtime ahead of time or before it occurs.

Proactive IT support refers to a practice in which a service desk or IT help desk uses advanced technology, such as AI algorithms, to help anticipate an upcoming incident, prepare for appropriate remediation, quickly mitigate the incident, and minimize the impact.

Adopting a proactive approach helps build resilient IT support and prevent future incidents from occurring.

For example, an issue that arises more frequently with a traditional approach cannot recur in a proactive setting, with continuous monitoring suggesting real-time diagnosis and maintenance recommendations to prevent the issue from becoming repetitive.

In addition to delivering AI-powered proactive support, Generative AI aims to automate incident detection and management., which reduces extra effort in analytics maneuver and manual threat remediation.

The proactive service desk outperforms reactive IT support in many ways, considering its capabilities in mitigating business impact and driving business success.

There is no doubt about traditional service desks being reactive.

Conversely, an AI-powered service desk already gives an early indicator of upcoming IT incidents in the environment. But when it works with millions of real-world IT incident parameters aided by large language models (LLMs) or Generative AI, it’s more than twice as powerful and high-performant as AIOps.

Below are a few examples.

1. Rapid mitigation of incidents with MRI

Generative AI is better at deriving contextual awareness frommachine-reported incidents than user- or customer-reported incidents.

Manual summarization for root cause analysis: In the live environment, CRIs that go out for on-call engineers' attendance may need more meaningful information to find root cause analysis from the manually created incident summary and title.

GenAI advantage for root cause analysis: When a generative AI receives MRIs from ITSM platforms powered by LLM, it can speed up the root cause analysis process and suggest rapid mitigation action plans.

Upon receiving a summary and title of the incident, it analyzes billions of live and historical incident data in its database, readily breaks them down to discover root cause analysis(finding targeted assets and impacts they may unleash), and offers mitigation plans.

Generative AI offers better insights into incidents using MRIs over CRIs and helps reduce impacts. As a result, the mean time to respond gets faster, helping minimize business impact

2. Automated incident detection and resolution

Generative AI helps automate incident detection and offer resolution plans proactively as compared to AIOps.

Once Generative AI receives IoT-connected alerts from CMDB, it reduces many manual workflows and automates them for faster resolution of incidents by

• Automatically creating an incident summary and title

• Analyzing incident summaries and titles to further improve predictions about future impacted IT assets

As a result, Generative AI continues to offer predictions for evolving scenarios and alert users about any anomaly before it becomes a major issue.

For example, a site crashes when heavy traffic occurs during peak sales. It has been checked and fixed. By building an end-to-end monitoring functionality with IoT, an advanced IT alert can be sent out for responders when a certain threshold is reached. Generative AI reduces the manual efforts for IT alert analysis and automates incident detection by pointing to storage capacity issues. As a result, an IT team can address this issue faster and deny any future underperformance.

3. Improved visibility across IT assets

Not always does a service desk receive alerts on changes that happen across IT assets for incidents. Too often, this remains unnoticed and offers little visibility for future service improvements.

Generative AI can improve incident diagnosis and better remediation for future incidents using Retrieval-Augmented Generation.

RAG produces more knowledgeable insights by learning and retrieving data from historical incidents, activity logs, and troubleshooting guides. As a result, Generative AI can help boost change management with complete visibility across IT assets.

4. Predictive analytics for remediation of future incidents

By leveraging historical incident data, Generative AI provides easy access to data endpoints to identify specific patterns of future incident behavior. This predictive capability allows for faster incident analysis and allocation of necessary resources to prevent IT incidents before they occur.

Generative AI can do a lot to transform a traditional service desk or AIOps into a smarter service desk with proactive capabilities.

Cross-team collaboration

By integrating with a conversational AI platform such as Workativ, Generative AI provides a powerful chat interface with continuous references to the incident history and data for real-time discussion on the incident diagnosis.

With a large language model supplying necessary information from activity logs and documents, the generative AI chat interface deciphers NLP-based queries. It produces coherent and contextual responses, generating more meaningful conversations and real-time solutions for incident management processes.

Self-healing IT automation

With generative AI capabilities, your service desk is independent and powerful. Users are more empowered to auto-resolve issues for any common IT issues using advanced search results and reduce workload for the service desk.

Say a user needs assistance recovering login credentials for an application.

Since password reset is the most common IT issue, it becomes repetitive and mundane for the service desk.

By allowing the creation of automated workflows for password reset, Generative AI ensures that users can instantly find specific information rather than links or documents to reset passwords.

Besides, LLMs offer help using their external database if an internal search result fails. For example, Workativuses Hybrid NLU to improve knowledge search and enhance user experience with improved fallbacks. As a result, Workativ ensures no query goes unanswered and provides an accurate response.

Knowledge article development

A proactive service desk must provide continuous knowledge articles to help IT responders with the latest information on IT incidents, accelerate incident diagnosis, and prevent issues in advance.

As Generative AI allows creating a knowledge article draft with information about IT ticket handling and various unique steps using automated workflows, it becomes easy to provide vital information to keep track of incidents and help teams be aware of technicalities to mitigate incidents.

IT response improvement with data cleansing

A wrong input can produce incorrect suggestions and prevent the incident diagnosis process in real-time. Generative AI can clean data and match queries asked for instead of generating inappropriate responses.

With accurate responses, Generative AI facilitates correct IT responses and improves mitigation efforts by IT teams.

Multi-language IT responses

IT incident responses can be multilingual. Prior LLM training in a wide variety of languages, Generative AI can produce IT responses and workflows in multiple languages, improving incident handling capability for people with regional language understanding.

On the other hand, this capability helps personalize conversations for users when they connect with the service desk.

• Low volume of IT tickets

With end-to-end monitoring across IT assets, Generative AI ensures all systems are working in the correct order. Also, predictive monitoring capabilities allow for incident diagnosis and prevention of incidents ahead of time. As a result, the service desk tends to receive a low volume of tickets.

• Cost efficiency for the low frequency of incidents

The ability to diagnose future incidents reduces the likelihood of frequent incidents, eventually reducing the utilization of on-call engineers. Moreover, organizations are more likely to avoid costly repairs using predictive maintenance recommendations.

• Elevated user experience

With IT assets unleashing the best capacity with minimal downtime impacts, employees face less workplace friction and more flexibility to work at scale.

Also, the ability to auto-resolve issues gives them more freedom to find information rapidly and reduce manual workloads.

Workativ provides a unique employee support experience using its powerful Knowledge AI Search capability for conversational AI platforms across enterprise use cases.

Knowledge search and auto-resolution

Workativ allows powerful AI knowledge search for users in the enterprise context. For repetitive issues such as application provisioning, password reset, PTO query, and leave query,Workativ allows responses at scale and speed without the need for human intervention. By allowing integration with the enterprise knowledge bases, website, or external databases, Workativ ensures all IT queries offer better intent matching and context detection to improve HR and IT support auto-resolution.

Workflow automation and proactive responses

The Workativ conversational AI platform is powered by a large language model capability, which speeds up dialog development for conversation flows and enables faster workflow automation creation using the chatbot builder interface.

Enterprise leaders can leverage this platform to automate IT workflows and enable faster communications for their internal users.

Seamless integration with industry-leading ITSM platforms

Workativ offers seamless integration with all the leading ITSM ticketing tools in the industry. Without switching to a costly version of an embedded chatbot of an ITSM tool, Workativ allows you to create app workflow automation for your use cases and leverage the power of Generative AI for speedier IT responses and faster incident mitigation. For example, Workativ’s chatbot syncs with ServiceNow, InvGate, and Fresh service, to name a few, and offers the flexibility of communicating IT incidents via familiar collaboration channels likeMS Teams and Slack.

In the rapidly evolving scenario, industry leaders need fast responses to mitigate IT incidents and continue providing an environment where their people can thrive by mitigating incidents in real-time. Proactive IT support pushes for business objectives by restricting untimely and unexpected incidents.

Generative AI provides powerful ways to conform to the enterprise's objectives and a preventative template to reduce the business impact. Although Generative AI needs continuous fine-tuning to improve incident detection and resolution, repetitive and constant development in the LLM space can reduce this probability and enable self-learning at scale. As a result, Generative AI can be more robust in augmenting service desk capabilities and helping industry leaders transition steadily from reactive to proactive IT support infrastructure.

Want to learn more about how Workativ conversational AI can help you build proactive IT support with minimal effort? Schedule a demo today.

1. What is reactive vs. proactive support?

Reactive support is fixing a problem only when it occurs. Proactive support, however, means detecting a problem early and mitigating it before it occurs.

2. What is a proactive service desk?

In ITSM, a proactive service desk is designed to prevent problems before they occur. It means having resources and tools to identify and mitigate a problem before it becomes a deterrent to employee productivity.

3. How does Generative AI help build proactive service desks?

Generative AI harnesses deep learning algorithms to gain predictive analytics by fetching multi-variant data points. When applied to service desks, it helps derive early risk patterns, detect real-time threats, and suggest actions to mitigate them before they impact business assets and employee experience.

For example, if an employee’s device is low on disk capacity, Generative AI can observe it and trigger a workflow for auto-resolutions before it completely cuts down on productivity.

4. What are some examples of Generative AI that drive service desks to proactive employee support?

Generative AI facilitates significant productivity efficiencies for all-encompassing service desk operations. It automates

• Cross-team collaboration to accelerate collaborations for data-driven decision-making

• Self-service functionalities for employees to handle routine tasks such as password resets, software installs, software upgrades, and troubleshooting of devices

• Knowledge management through data ingestion and content generation capability

5. How can Workative help with generative AI?

Workativ provides a Knowledge AI platform for building your LLM-powered chat interface, which facilitates communication and collaboration for service desk support automation.

Through integration, your people can automate routine tasks, create a ticket, check status, and connect with live agents.