2024 was a very interesting year across Enterprise Service Management (ESM) thanks to the progress, availability, and adoption of Intelligent Automation and AI. You can read more about last year over on LinkedIn. If last year was a year of experimentation by the early adopters, this year will be about adoption from the rest of the market. This will separate those able to elevate themselves above the Hype and bet on technologies generating business value and return on investment (ROI) from the rest of the market that will keep falling behind and start losing talent.
I suspect that mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity will continue in 2025, and we can expect a few surprises, but I would not foresee any to be as seismic as the Nissan-Honda-Mitsubishi one. Personnel shuffle in top technology leader roles will speed up due to businesses' increasing savviness about the quality of IT leadership investments and their increased visibility and control over the technology function enabled by new technology.
Hyperautomation
Hyperautomation will continue spreading across all industries as an approach to solving business challenges with technology (especially automation) first, before looking to deploy more human resources. This will accelerate the development of technology, increase automation/AI skill base, and drive the industry from reactive, to proactive, to predictive.
The ESM industry has seen a remarkable shift of the art of possible from proactive to predictive in 2024. This year, organisations will identify how the investment into AI and automation will help them jump from a low maturity, reactive state straight into leveraging predictive intelligence. Uncategorised, cluttered data and outdated processes will still hold them back to an extent. However, investment in the right technologies will give them the visibility they lack. This will significantly speed up their understanding of where they are and, most importantly, the gaps they need to focus on to see the best ROI – skill gaps, process inefficiencies, data consolidation, and data accuracy.
The market has also had a chance to see what can be achieved with AI and automation in 2024, helping leaders manage their expectations and not settle for 18-month-long projects without a guarantee of return on investment. Especially in AIOps, it’s become evident that customers should not settle for spending significant resources and can demand clear value from the vendors and their teams.
Industry 5.0 Agents
As part of the Industry 5.0 movement, the adoption of Citizen Development and low-code/zero-code will continue in 2025, but with significantly more help from GenAI copilots, that will see another year of blossoming with new capabilities and a better understanding of the queries. Gartner’s prediction that by 2026, developers outside formal IT departments will account for at least 80% of the user base for low-code development tools, up from 60% in 2021, will likely come true to an even larger extent. However, not just the pre-built templates, drag-and-drop functionality, and automated coding help businesses develop applications faster and bring them to market more quickly. It will mostly happen thanks to adopting AI copilots and employees learning how to leverage the technology best. Be it IT, HR, Legal, Facilities, or Finance, 82% of executives, 56% of managers, and 43% of employees use GenAI in their work already, saving them 5 hours of productive time a week.
Depending on the organisations approach to AI, they may end up with multiple specialist virtual agents/copilot tools, racking up costs of the agents talking to one another in endless loops, and overpaying for equivalent capabilities. Whilst this was not an issue in 2023 and 2024, I suspect that with the rise of Agentic AI in 2025, we will see early adopters to start rationalising their portfolio and assessing true costs of multi-agent environments.
Agentic AI for Business Reporting
One of the key shifts in the industry in 2025 onwards will be on a cultural level, right at the top of the hierarchical business pyramid. Until now, technology would agree Service Level Agreements (SLA) with the business, enabling them to mark their own homework and reporting back to the CIO and CFO in cryptic language, bearing very little meaning or significance to the business leaders. At the beginning of the year then, the business would provide technology departments with the obligatory finance +/-10%, as they seem to hit their targets and “know their stuff”. The Watermelon Effect created in the background and IT self-reporting will no longer be tolerated from this year onwards, as the advancements in AI provide the business with a new tool – Agentic AI – digital systems that can independently interact with multiple existing software tools and platforms in the background, enabling the business leaders to query any data across the business in their own natural language. Therefore, the business no longer waits for being reported to, they get a solid report of their technology performance from the Agent and will even be able to compare it to other businesses.
This may well be the end of an era for IT where they could hide behind 20-year-old SLAs and technical language to get the business off their backs. Expect some toys to be thrown out of prams worldwide this year, as GenAI will report more accurately and understandably to the board than the IT leadership.
Brilliant Basics
Organisations have learned through experimentation with various forms of automation and AI in the past few years that data and process review and optimisation are key to its successful adoption. Whilst this should not stop organisations from adopting AI and gaining experience and skills, it is important to understand that budget needs to be allocated to building out the foundation upon which the new technology can thrive – Brilliant Basics.
These Brilliant Basics form the basis of a strong ESM strategy, enabling organisations to deliver exceptional service, improve efficiency, and enhance customer satisfaction. What are the key aspects to look out for in 2025?
- Process Management and ITIL Adoption: Effective process management is crucial for a strong ITSM strategy. Adopting frameworks like ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) helps align IT operations with business needs and ensures continual improvement.
- Promoting Self-Service Solutions: Empowering end-users to resolve common issues independently through self-service portals and a well-maintained knowledge base can significantly reduce the workload of IT help desks.
- Implementing Knowledge-Centred Service: Creating and maintaining a comprehensive knowledge base that captures solutions to common issues and best practices helps improve service delivery and reduces resolution times.
- Streamlining Change Management: Efficient change management processes ensure that changes to IT services are implemented smoothly and with minimal disruption to the business.
- Optimising Resource and Capacity Allocation: Properly managing and allocating resources and capacity ensures that IT services are delivered efficiently and can scale to meet business demands.
The great news? You are no longer alone in any of the above as the leading vendors have the best practices integrated into their platforms already, and you can now use their GenAI and automation capabilities to generate knowledge, automate workflows, streamline software development, change and resource optimisation.
At CDW UK, we have a whole host of workshops and programs that will help you get started. Reach out to us here and reference this article.
Human-centric Service Management
It is time to kill self-centric IT in 2025, and this will become self-evident in an increasing number of Requests for Information and Procurement (RFIs and RFPs) requiring proof of well-established Experience Level Agreement (XLAs) continual improvement programs (CIP) from anyone looking for to bid for the business. For too long, the industry relied on charging methods such as “per ticket,” driving any support organisation away from Problem Management by default, as they would be preventing more tickets from happening, and therefore reducing the amount of money they get paid. In fact, it would motivate them to close tickets early so that another ticket is raised and they get paid even more for the same issue. This should no longer be acceptable in 2025 onwards.
I expect organisations demanding dynamic XLAs to be in place alongside traditional (reviewed) SLAs and contractually established practices that show how the IT support provider delivered increased productivity time of end users, drove a decrease of MTTR, reduced the number of underlying issues through Problem Management, but also demonstrated engagement with end users in a meaningful way, gather their device performance and feedback, processed the quantitative and qualitative data, and actioned the outputs (data-driven decisions) to deliver true business outcomes. For this to be possible, the IT Support departments and MSPs will need a reasonably mature, automated practice with a true focus on human-centric delivery and the ability to show the business value and ROI.
Zero Ticket
Expect your head to hurt from the number of times you hear “Zero Ticket” in 2025. However, unlike in the past, when it traditionally represented service departments' efforts to receive as few tickets as possible, primarily by Shifting Left and moving the resolution of requests and incidents onto end users via self-service portals or chatbots, we are now talking about true human-centric design.
The industry has been struggling to shift from reactive (wait for tickets to be reported, then fix it in alignment with Incident Management) to proactive (this is likely to cause issues in the future; let’s fix it to prevent incidents from happening – as per Problem Management). However, technological advancements of the last couple of years provide IT Operations departments with machine learning that learns about their environments, looks for anomalies, and, combined with pre-learned data from other organisations, can spot underlying issues quickly and point them out as a ticket. This automated Root Cause Analysis (RCA) would not be enough on its own, as you still have agents too busy with Incident Management to spend time on actioning Problem Management. This is where Event Management and Monitoring automation clusters hundreds of events into one, reducing noise, providing agents with focus, and saving them time otherwise spent on Mean time to Detect. Time that can now be used to fix underlying problems.
Moreover, DEX technology continuously analyses end-user device hardware and software data and correlates it with regular performance, informing the service departments of any anomalies before the end-users spot them. This can be linked to an automated workflow that raises a ticket and informs all the affected employees that they are undergoing an investigation. Significant drops in customer feedback scores can also generate an automated ticket, preventing further tickets from being generated.
In both cases of leveraging AIOps and DEX technology, even though tickets were raised on the system, the end-user/customer/employee did not have to raise any tickets, hence the term “Zero Ticket.”
Summary
2025 will be another exciting year for Enterprise Service Management as we will see further adoption of AI, Automation, and Human-centric service design, leveraging Brilliant Basics. At CDW UK, we cannot wait to continue working with our existing customers and introduce many new ones to the benefits of the continuously advancing technology.
We wish you all a successful year in 2025, filled with recognition for how incredible ROI, business value, and improvements to their work lives made people feel.
Contributors
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Jaro Tomik
Chief Technologist - Digital Enablement