Generative Synthetic Intelligence (Gen AI) is currently a prominent topic, and for good reason. In the current macroeconomic landscape, AI holds the potential to assist organizations with limited resources in scaling and enhancing their effectiveness. According to McKinsey, Gen AI has the capacity to contribute trillions of dollars in value to the global economy, influencing a wide range of industries.
One notable application of Gen AI is in driving more agile customer service experiences. Meeting the escalating demand for high-quality delivery and rapid response poses a significant challenge. Additionally, customers are becoming increasingly familiar with this technology. It’s reasonable to expect the same level of agility from any digital enterprise.
For IT operations (ITOps) teams, Gen AI presents an excellent opportunity to boost capacity and productivity while also saving costs. However, embarking on the path of Gen AI adoption can feel daunting. This transition necessitates changes in the organization’s culture, skills, processes, and security. To initiate this journey, start with a concrete set of strategies and use cases.
A Step-by-Step Method to Gen AI
The strength of Gen AI lies in organizing and condensing data. Its purpose is to assist with tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming, such as drafting status updates, establishing incident timelines, or initiating the initial steps in creating a runbook. Gen AI serves as a starting point rather than the ultimate solution for your business strategy and challenges.
Moreover, as is the case with any novel methodology or technology, commencing with a small-scale approach is the most effective strategy. Focusing on a narrower scope simplifies testing and learning processes. Here are four steps to initiate the journey on the right path:
1. Assess current needs: Commence with a small team or project, identify its specific needs and challenges, and determine which ones can be addressed by Gen AI.
2. Set clear goals: Once the scope of action is defined, it’s time to outline the scope of success. What benefits do you anticipate from Gen AI? Establish a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) accordingly.
3. Research and educate: Evaluate available Gen AI tools and platforms that align with your team’s or project’s needs, budget, scalability requirements, and security standards. Research and document Gen AI best practices to provide adequate training for your team. Topics such as security, compliance, and data quality are crucial.
4. Measure and report: Implement a feedback loop to track Gen AI’s performance in alignment with the previously established KPIs. Assess improvements after each experiment.
Three Use Instances to Think about Proper Now
Here are three instances illustrating how your team can initiate the use of Gen AI to achieve small, quick, and impactful victories:
- Create workflows and runbooks: Gen AI can serve as a collaborative author for automation, assisting ITOps teams in managing and resolving unplanned work more expeditiously. Not only can Gen AI generate detailed, well-structured runbooks, but it can also retrieve real-time data from monitoring tools, logs, or other sources to provide context and recommendations for potential updates. Consequently, Gen AI proves to be a potent ally in eliminating manual tasks across a range of activities, from deploying routine maintenance tasks to initiating research and remediation actions to resolve common incidents. Prior to this, it’s essential to excel in your prompt engineering.
- Foster healthy stakeholder communication: Especially during major incidents, keeping internal and external stakeholders informed is a crucial aspect of resolution. Best practices in the industry recommend providing regular status updates to stakeholders and leadership every half-hour, at a minimum. However, teams need to focus on identifying and resolving issues. Crafting these updates and aligning their tone with the audience takes time. Here, Gen AI can once again save time and resources. By automatically collecting and consolidating relevant incident data, it can generate a draft of a status update within seconds. It can even extract information from Slack and other popular team chat apps to enhance the AI output.
- Facilitate continuous documentation and learning: Cultivating a culture of (innocuous) learning within the organization is crucial for improving processes and avoiding recurring errors. Implementing incident postmortems is a significant step in that direction. However, it takes time for teams to fully and manually document the when, what, and how of an incident. With Gen AI, this process can be streamlined in just a few clicks. By extracting information from the incident’s timeline, logs, metrics, and incident-specific chats, it can provide a detailed account of the incident’s progress and, more importantly, recommend next steps.
Maintain Human Oversight Throughout
Although AI plays a role in content generation, human supervision is indispensable to guarantee accuracy and relevance at every stage. Always ensure that the team’s relevant subject matter expert reviews and edits content as necessary. It’s crucial to emphasize that while Gen AI is instrumental in handling certain aspects of the workload, it cannot substitute human expertise.
Revolutionize Your Operations with Gen AI
Initiate the utilization of Gen AI to expedite and enhance the efficiency of managing unplanned work. Learn about how PagerDuty leverages Gen AI within the PagerDuty Operations Cloud.
