Disclaimer : This article reflects our personal perspectives and experiences and does not represent the views of our employers or ServiceNow. We have used Generative AI as a supporting tool for selected visuals, concept exploration, and content refinement. The experiences, architecture thinking, observations, and conclusions shared here are our own.
Hello All ,
This year, I had the opportunity to be a first-time speaker at ServiceNow Knowledge 2026, where I spoke about a topic that has become very close to the work I do with customers: AI Agents and ITOM, and the journey towards Zero-Touch IT. I was fortunate to share the session with My co-speaker, Avinash. For Avinash, speaking at Knowledge for the first time was a special experience. But what stayed with me after the session was not only the experience of being on stage. It was the conversations around the topic and, more importantly, the questions people were asking about how realistic Zero-Touch IT actually is. so I thought of sharing this here for the large forum to consume.
Today, almost every technology conversation eventually comes back to AI. We talk about Generative AI, AI agents, AIOps, autonomous systems and self-healing operations. There is a lot of excitement around these technologies, and rightly so. But when I speak with customers about IT Operations, I often find myself coming back to a much simpler question: with all the monitoring, automation and operational data we already have today, why does it still take so much human effort to resolve an IT issue? Think about what happens during a typical production issue. A monitoring tool generates an alert and an incident gets created. Someone from the operations team starts looking at it and soon realizes that another team needs to be involved. The application team joins, then perhaps the infrastructure or database team. If the issue is serious enough, a bridge call starts, and different teams begin looking at their own tools and their own part of the technology stack. Someone asks whether there was a recent change. Someone else checks the CMDB. Another engineer searches previous incidents to see whether the same problem has happened before. The database team looks at database health, the infrastructure team looks at the server, and the application team looks at logs and response times. Eventually, the team connects the dots, identifies the likely cause, performs the remediation and waits to see whether the application has recovered. Anyone who has spent time around enterprise IT Operations will probably recognize some version of this situation. What makes it interesting is that most organizations are not short of technology. They already have monitoring platforms, ITSM, automation and CMDBs. Many have invested heavily in observability and AIOps as well. The problem is therefore not simply that we need another monitoring tool or another automation script. In many cases, the bigger challenge is that a human is still the one bringing all of this information together, understanding what it means and deciding what to do next. For me, this is where the Zero-Touch IT conversation really begins.
We Have Changed the Technology, but Have We Changed the Way We Operate IT?
We have modernized our technology from on-premises infrastructure to cloud, SaaS, APIs, containers, and increasingly AI-driven platforms. But in many organizations, IT operations still follow the same reactive model: something breaks → an alert fires → a ticket is created → someone investigates → someone fixes it. The tools have become smarter, but the operating model around them has not always evolved at the same pace. The real opportunity is not simply adding another monitoring tool or AI capability; it is connecting signals, context, intelligence, and action so IT can respond before users feel the impact.
That is where the journey toward zero-touch IT operations really begins, not by removing people, but by changing where and when humans need to intervene.
Key Takeaway
Modern technology alone does not create modern IT operations. Zero-touch begins when we move from reacting to incidents to sensing, understanding, deciding, and acting automatically—with humans involved where their judgment adds value.
But this raises the next question: What does “zero-touch” actually mean in a real enterprise environment? Is it realistic to automate everything, or should some decisions always remain with people? let's see in part 2.
