Breaking new grounds in IT asset management with AI

Intelligent grouping of discovered IT assets

Multi-modal discovery helps gather wide-ranging asset data points to centralize visibility. Yet, gaps in data collection could result in data inconsistencies. Further, driven by predefined parameters, manual grouping becomes rigid, failing to consider finer details. Predictive AI can intelligently group IT assets by analyzing contextual information, including business-criticality, user roles, departmental functions, and history of usage. This ensures a nuanced and real-time classification of IT assets, facilitating context-aware operations.

For example, predictive AI can group IT assets used by the NOC team as critical and high-performing since they are integral to business continuity. Also, AI can differentiate individual IT assets, be they production or staging servers, based on their functionality, helping ITAM teams prioritize their maintenance.

On demand insights on IT asset inventory

After discovering IT assets, keeping tabs on the IT asset inventory is crucial to achieving business objectives. But fragmented data and disconnected systems often hinder visibility, stalling key decisions. Leveraging GenAI, IT asset managers can simply ask questions in natural language and receive human-like, contextual responses. This way, they gain actionable intelligence while bridging visibility gaps.

To bolster their IT security posture, IT asset managers can inquire about the number of devices approved for corporate travel. They can also obtain information on their status, including missing patches, the severity of vulnerabilities, and access controls, all in an easy-to-digest format. Equipped with such insights, they are enabled to quickly address underlying risks while boosting productivity.

Smart recommendations for assets and consumables purchase based on ticket trends

While gaining visibility over IT asset inventory is helpful, streamlining asset procurement is essential to optimize their IT costs. However, ad-hoc asset purchases lead to over or understocking and misaligned IT budget allocations. By analyzing ticket trends, predictive AI can identify seasonal demands to forecast optimal purchasing quantities, while GenAI further contextualizes these recommendations.

If a company is ordering laptops for new hires, predictive AI can analyze past onboarding trends and suggest order adjustments based on seasonal demand, such as reducing quantities during slower periods. Further, GenAI can offer tailored recommendations, such as alternative laptop models based on user preferences or recurring issues. This way, IT asset managers can align their procurement decisions with business requirements while delivering better employee experiences.

Automated creation and approval of purchase orders

As procurement operations scale, involving multiple stakeholders complicates communication, resulting in unnecessary delays. After dissecting procurement requirements, GenAI can assist in creating purchase orders, crafting tailored, context-rich emails to vendors, with relevant document attachments. Based on historical data on procurement approvals and vendor responses, a machine learning engine can identify patterns and recommend approvals for purchase orders that fall within preset thresholds. This way, IT asset managers can accelerate vendor communication while also ensuring a strategic control over procurement decisions.

Tailored assignment and recommendation of IT assets to employees

After streamlining procurement operations, refining the assignment of IT assets is vital for enhancing employee experiences. However, the traditional one-size-fits-all approach often falls short of meeting unique requirements, resulting in inefficient IT asset utilization and spiraling IT costs. In contrast, AI can provide tailored IT asset recommendations by considering contextual factors, including user preferences, roles, work environments, workloads, and organizational security and compliance requirements.

When onboarding an employee as a developer, predictive AI can correlate the performance of IT assets with role requirements and suggest high-performance laptops optimal for developers. GenAI can further build on this by recommending specific configurations, such as preinstalling certain IDEs or setting security configurations to meet ISO 27001 standards. This would boost employee productivity and optimize IT asset utilization while ensuring adherence to security requirements.

Proactive anomaly detection to improve digital experiences

While tailored assignment of IT assets can improve employee productivity, it is equally essential to detect performance anomalies early before they impact employees. But, with traditional IT support models, IT teams tend to act only after employees report endpoint issues, delaying resolution. If left unattended, such anomalies could lead to potential security threats.

To move from a reactive firefighting approach to a proactive strategy, AI plays a critical role. By deciphering Digital Employee Experience (DEX) scores across end points, predictive AI can spot potential anomalies, automatically triggering the creation of tickets with relevant information. Here, GenAI can step in to summarize the ticket, as well as highlight the nature of the deviation, potential causes, and the affected systems, while equipping IT teams with rich context. To prevent such recurrences in the future, GenAI can suggest actionable steps, from patching an outdated software to upgrading the RAM. This facilitates a proactive model while delivering superior employee experiences.

Facilitating seamless IT asset audits

As enterprises scale, tracking the whereabouts of IT assets and adapting to changing regulatory requirements become daunting. Being labor-intensive, relying on manual audit processes could result in unforeseen errors and hefty penalties. Fortunately, AI can ease the manual workload and streamline the audit process.

By consolidating data from various sources—such as check-in/check-out logs or geolocation data from UEM solutions—GenAI can provide real-time insights on asset locations. This way, IT asset managers can quickly retrieve information about IT assets located outside their designated regions without manual checks.

To bridge existing compliance gaps and stay audit-ready, GenAI can review regulatory standards (such as PCI DSS 4.0, ISO 27001:2022, and CIS Critical Security Controls) and suggest updates to organizational audit policies. Further, by drafting a comprehensive audit checklist, GenAI can equip IT asset managers with actionable steps to ensure ongoing compliance.

Final thoughts

From streamlining your IT asset compliance processes to optimizing IT budgets, AI can be a game-changer for your ITAM operations. However, our survey, The State of AI In ITSM- 2024, reveals that 62% of the respondents find AI implementation challenging. Despite this, 81% are eager to leverage AI to streamline ITSM processes and reduce costs. Redefining your ITAM strategy with AI is a step in this direction. AI, when implemented right, can help you unlock greater business value from IT.