In all my blog posts so far, I have been providing suggestions on how to expedite your AI adoption journey. I believe it is now time to describe what we are doing here at Digitate: Helping enterprises to become a ticketless business. Even though this is the same adoption journey that I have been describing, it has a different perspective; I’m turning my focus “lens” from outward to inward.
This is a major strategic project for Digitate because we will show how far our company can practically implement the ticketless vision. It will demonstrate how much we can leverage AI to run a company. Bottom line, we want to answer this question: Can Digitate be a company entirely AI-powered and yet human-driven?
Our approach: Let the machines handle the boring parts
The main principle of Digitate’s ticketless initiative is leveraging AI to perform any activity that does not require essential human skills. These activities are both reactive and proactive:
- “Reactive” applies to AI use cases that react to a situation, i.e. resolving a trouble ticket or a request. For example, removing and re-installing a damaged application, or resetting a password.
- “Proactive” activities are those AI use cases that forecast an undesirable situation and fulfill all necessary activities to prevent it. For example, anticipating that post-holiday sales will create excessive demands on the web server and making sure it won’t crash.
- What about the generative angle?
Together, they’re all the IT and business activities that can be executed by Standard Operating Procedures and don’t require either a strategic decision or a productive human interaction to be fulfilled. For example, we will let AI handle routine activities such as purchase order releases or security audit controls, but not purchasing negotiations or discussions with auditor teams.
The 60% solution
The differentiators, the essential skills that humans bring, are strategic thinking and empathy. As Yuval Noah Harari stated in his book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity,” human beings now dominate the world due to their ability to collaborate. Empathy is the common denominator of collaboration, so we won’t try to use AI to fulfill any tasks that require empathy. Also, we will not replace any strategic thinking activities because such activities require a solid self-awareness of Digitate’s business context – and AI is still not self-aware (as of now).
The value of our strategy is confirmed by a survey of 600-plus IT directors that we commissioned last fall. The survey found that 90% of IT decision-makers plan to add more automation by the end of 2024, and 26 percent want to become autonomous in the next five years. If we want to be a convincing vendor of autonomous solutions, we need to show that we’re committed to the philosophy ourselves.
We believe that at least 60% of any business’s tasks can be fulfilled by AI. But even with state-of-the-art tools, the AI transformation will take substantial time to implement. That’s why I’ll be sharing updates throughout this year.
Meet our AI-based master craftsman
And how will we accomplish this ticketless goal? By employing “Master Ignio.” This name has a double connotation: First, it’s literally the master instance of our ignio AIOps platform, which will observe, automate, analyze, and optimize all our other IT operations. And second, it’s a slightly fanciful reference to the custom in pre-modern Europe of calling people who had truly mastered their craft “Master [Name].” (Even today, we address the person who conducts an orchestra, making hundreds of players work in perfect synchronization, as “Maestro.”)
This is an ambitious vision, which will require a corporate metamorphosis. Digitate is no different from any other company in making human labor the default solution for any task. But our company’s practices need to evolve to make AI the default executor of routine office tasks.
To fulfill that vision, we expect to use the Master ignio instance to:
- Control and manage our customers’ ignio platforms. Master ignio will be connected to each SaaS (i.e. cloud-based) ignio instance, providing continuous support to that entire customer base. It will deliver an enhanced production support experience including MTTR improvements and higher platform availability.
- Improve Digitate productivity (aiming at about 30%). Master ignio will deliver the output of multiple people, while they move on to other, higher-value duties at Digitate – a net gain without increasing headcount.
- Focus our colleagues’ attention on how to improve Digitate as a company: Digitate will increase customer focus, improving overall customer experience. Master ignio will allow Digitate colleagues to collaborate better and think strategically once they’re freed from routine tasks.
Production milestones in our AI journey
2023 was a pivotal year for Digitate. We moved all our SaaS customers to an ignio AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services) version: ignio now runs on a container version managed by the Azure platform. And since all our AKS customers are monitored by ignio Observe already, that prompted us to fully adopt Observe as our own internal monitoring tool. Now ignio Observe is monitoring 2,500 containers in production environments and 1,000 containers in non-production environments.
The milestone of adopting ignio Observe for all our internal AKS monitoring was strategic not just as a proof point for large-scale Observe adoption, but to speed up deployment of our flagship ignio AIOps product as the core of the Master ignio plan
Meanwhile, we deployed our flagship AIOps product (https://digitate.com/ignio-aiops/) as the core of Digitate Master ignio.
Master ignio manages 100% of our alerts and reduces 96% of the noise.
As of the end of 2023, Master ignio allowed us to move 15% of our production resources toward more strategic and empathic tasks such as premium support activities, which require closer customer collaboration.
We are also starting to extend Master Ignio to purchasing and audit activities.
Finally, we are going to leverage generative AI to manage Digitate customer knowledge inquiries. This solution will leverage a new ignio functionality powered by GenAI, which will be released later in 2024.
No ticket needed for this journey
In 2023 we started Digitate’s ticketless journey, which will continue at least through this year.
In future blogs, I will keep you briefed on our progress. Bottom line: We want to show that since our stock in trade is helping enterprises run more efficiently, we’re not being hypocritical — we’re also taking our own advice.
