How agentic IT operations transform IT Service Management (ITSM)

Enterprise ITOps leaders are realizing that legacy incident management processes are collapsing under the weight of today’s sprawling, hybrid-cloud enterprise environments. The fastest path from reactive firefighting to proactive, automated control is an agentic AI-powered incident assistant that can understand context, coordinate people, and take intelligent action at machine speed.

Enterprise IT doesn’t look anything like it did even five years ago. Hybrid cloud architectures, distributed microservices, and increasingly rapid CI/CD cycles have redefined what “normal” operations look like—and what “broken” looks like too.

And while businesses adopt new technologies to accelerate delivery and innovation, operations teams are stuck with the consequences:

Enterprise Management Associates found that major IT service outages are increasing in cost, frequency, and duration. Major outages can cost large enterprises an average of nearly $25,000 per minute, or $1.5 million per hour. As IT outage costs increase, it’s critical to resolve incidents as fast as possible to minimize the impact on your organization. 

When every minute counts, outdated incident processes aren’t just inefficient. They’re an existential business risk. Enterprises need a more agile and intelligent approach that leverages advances in AI and automation to combat spiraling headcount, observability, and ITSM costs, ensuring that IT remains scalable, effective, and sustainable. 

Agentic ITOps offers a solution by transforming manual and reactive ITSM processes into intelligent, autonomous systems. These systems can adapt to changing environments, learn from experience, and collaborate with humans to respond to incidents at machine speed. With intelligent, automated workflows, enterprises stand to gain faster mean time to resolution (MTTR), lower operational overhead, and increased team productivity.

Let’s explore how enterprises can empower incident management teams with an AI-powered incident assistant. 

Shift IT incident management from reactive and manual to proactive and automated with agentic AI

To resolve incidents and maintain reliable services, enterprises typically rely on IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks. These frameworks provide structured processes for event management, incident management, change management, problem management, and other disciplines to ensure service continuity. ITSM helps centralized IT teams standardize operations, minimize disruptions, and ensure consistent delivery across the organization. 

ITSM relies on accurate and comprehensive data about an organization’s IT environment to be effective. However, this has become increasingly challenging as enterprise IT departments struggle to keep up with the dramatic increases in complexity, fragmentation, and chaos in their IT environments. 

At BigPanda, we recognize that advances in agentic AI can completely change this paradigm and bring significant improvements to the capability and efficiency of ITSM. Agentic AI is artificial intelligence that creates autonomous systems capable of making decisions and performing tasks without constant human intervention. These systems, also known as AI agents, can adapt to changing environments, learn from experience, and collaborate with humans to detect, respond to, and prevent incidents at machine speed. 

Critically, agentic AI-powered ITOps doesn’t require highly structured inputs to function, and can transform messy, scattered data into adaptive intelligence. BigPanda utilizes purpose-built agentic AI to augment responder expertise to reduce resolution times.  Advances in agentic AI have opened the door to previously unheard-of capabilities, such as AI-powered incident assistants. By incorporating an agentic AI-powered incident assistant into their incident management processes, enterprises can: 

Automate manual incident management workflows and help escalation teams quickly gain situational awareness. AI Incident Assistant brings teams together seamlessly in Slack or Teams with a managed incident channel that handles on-call paging, incident status updates, and transcribes bridge calls and chat. Instantly understand priorities and keep all stakeholders informed in real-time with automatic summaries of key insights and sync real-time updates across bridge calls, chat channels, and ITSM tickets.

Agentic AI minimizes the manual overhead associated with investigations, dramatically shortening the mean time to knowledge. Analyze real-time internal and external observability data, historical incidents, and informal knowledge to deliver actionable insights at every stage of the incident lifecycle. Deploy a team of AI agents across observability tools to gather context and identify anomalies, impacted hosts and services, and potential root cause in real time. Some AI Incident Assistant customers report 200% time savings in root cause analysis (RCA) generation. 

AI-powered automation reduces incident duration and volume, enabling faster, smarter, and lower-risk resolutions through evidence-based insights. L2 and L3 teams can focus on strategic, high-value work, empowering IT to meet customer and business demands, adhere to SLAs, and support innovation.

Investigate and resolve incidents faster with agentic AI assistance

The BigPanda AI Incident Assistant serves as a real-time AI partner for incident commanders, L2 engineers, site reliability engineers, and service owners to investigate and resolve incidents faster with agentic AI. It surfaces hidden institutional knowledge across siloed teams, tools, and systems to quickly uncover what’s happening, why, and how to resolve it.

The AI Incident Assistant facilitates a smart, proactive approach to incident management, maximizing the business impact of ITOps while elevating the roles of human operators. One of our customers’ technical support teams uses the BigPanda AI Incident Assistant to automate incident management tasks such as providing real-time summaries that update as the incident progresses and generating after-action reports. This saves an average of 35 minutes per interaction. The AI Incident Assistant agentically assembles relevant team members based on historically resolved incidents, and gives those SMEs the necessary information about what happened and how to resolve it.

The results? Fewer and shorter bridge calls, reduced call volume, duration, and number of attendees. This translates into considerable labor cost savings and decreased business disruptions. For BigPanda customers, the average reduction in bridge call costs ranged from 35% to 74%, resulting in annual cost savings of $1.8 million to $3.2 million. 

Learn more about transforming ITSM with an agentic AI-powered incident assistant

The BigPanda AI Incident Assistant enables enterprises to respond to incidents at machine speed, with our customers reporting a 20-30 minute reduction in manual tasks per incident. To learn more about the transformative potential of AI-powered incident assistants, check out our new e-book, From reactive chaos to automated control: Transform ITSM with an agentic AI-powered incident assistant.  

Get your copy today to learn how your enterprise can transform reactive incident management into intelligent, autonomous systems that meet the speed, complexity, and demands of modern IT environments.