What role does automation play when it comes to IT service management?

IT service management (ITSM) has transformed the way that the IT department operates and is perceived within businesses. While stereotypes about nerds lurking in basements full of hardware may persist, ITSM has helped ensure that IT is firmly part of the mainstream and delivers value to the organization as a whole.

ITSM is founded on frameworks like ITIL, ISO 20000, and COBIT. While each of these has its own characteristics, there are some overarching themes, such as:

• Establishing and evaluating the scope of the project
• Planning
• Ongoing monitoring and assessment of the system

It’s also typically delivered through SaaS applications and has been a stalwart of successful IT departments since the earliest days of the cloud revolution.

With all this in mind, it’s fair to say ITSM has become part of the furniture – after 20-30 years, though, furnishings need updating, and the same goes for technology.

The problem with legacy ITSM

In a blog post, Forrester analysts Julie Mohr and Charles Betz laid out an issue at the heart of ITSM: it hasn’t kept up with changing times. This may have been less apparent in 2020 than it is today, but the arrival of generative AI and increasing levels of automation elsewhere has started to lay this bare.

“Traditional ITSM, with its rigid structures and outdated assumptions, is giving way to a more adaptive model,” the authors say. “The future lies in holistic, business-centric service management—not bound to ‘IT’ but embedded across the enterprise. The goal isn’t more process—it’s smarter service.”

What does this mean? For Mohr and Betz, it’s “managing services end-to-end, from customer experience to operational execution, in a way that is both human-centered, automated, and data-driven”.

AI and automation are key underpinnings of this change, with agentic AI in particular called out as “the next leap forward”.

Fellow analyst house Gartner has also indicated that automation will have an important role to play in the future of ITSM. In its June 2025 Hype Cycle for ITSM tracker, Gartner already had one technology in this area – automated incident response – nudging into the ‘plateau of productivity’.

How automation works in ITSM

The goal of automation in ITSM isn’t to replace ITSM or IT practitioners but instead to make things easier and more efficient within the ITSM framework.

Simple tasks like provisioning user accounts, resetting passwords, and basic troubleshooting or diagnostics can all be automated using AI and machine learning (ML) tools. This, in turn, can free up IT staff to spend time on more strategic initiatives or dealing with more complex user requests that require a human touch and knowledge.

In terms of how this automation works in practice, ITSM-provider Freshworks outlines three technologies that need to work together to “streamline service delivery”: workflow engines, intelligent bots, and orchestration platforms.

Workflow engines are, in the words of Freshworks, the foundation upon which the rest of the automation setup works. They allow different systems to be connected and can trigger actions automatically when certain conditions are met.

Intelligent bots, such as generative AI chatbots, can quickly work out what a user needs based on natural language processing. This means they can quickly provide answers or, if the problem is too complex, escalate it to a human when necessary. An arrangement like this leads to a better user experience, quicker resolution, and round-the-clock first-layer support.

Orchestration platforms are the final part of the puzzle. If an organization has multiple automation components running, which is very possible and increasingly likely as time goes on, an orchestration platform brings them all together and ensures everything happens in the right order.

When and where to use automation in ITSM

When it comes to where to implement automation in ITSM, it can be applied to almost any area, from incident management to request fulfillment, from service catalog management to IT change management. That said, some technologies are more advanced and mature, while others are in the grip of hype or simply not very well developed.

Returning to Gartner’s Hype Cycle, several ITSM automation technologies are sitting in either the plateau of productivity or the ‘slope of enlightenment’ that may be of interest for even the most cautious business.

These include:

• Software asset management tools
• Automated incident response
• Virtual support agents
• Infrastructure automation
• Event intelligence solutions

Forrester’s Mohr and Betz recommend that organizations and their IT departments look at new areas of automation to invest in, however, rather than letting the current wave of transformation wash over them and potentially leave them behind.

“Too many organizations continue to postpone automation initiatives due to cost or capability gaps,” they say in their blog post, “but as system complexity grows, manual service management processes can no longer scale. Intelligent automation, coupled with observability platforms, provides a proactive edge, enabling systems to detect anomalies and initiate corrective action before they impact users. Now is the time to integrate automation into the operational roadmap, not treat it as a future consideration.”

Most importantly, however, businesses should take time to consider which provider can help them achieve the level of ITSM automation they want, support ongoing human agent interactions where needed, and offer the full suite of products they need.

They should also ensure their data enables efficient and error-free automation and AI implementation, now and in the future.

ITSM is a stalwart strategy for IT departments balancing the needs of the business, but it can be boring, repetitive, and low-value for IT professionals to keep a hand in manually. With automation and emerging technologies like generative AI, IT admins and support agents can turn their attention to more valuable and complex tasks.

Users, meanwhile, can get their routine issues solved more quickly than if they had to wait for a human to handle the request, making it a winning strategy for everyone involved.