How autonomous IT powers enterprise productivity

An explosion of services and data from digital transformation projects can put pressure on IT to constantly resolve incidents and maintain digital assets. According to Forrester, only 55% of employees feel fully supported by their organisation’s service desk,¹ for example, highlighting the need for improvement.

Autonomous IT—systems that can manage and optimise themselves with minimal human intervention—offers a solution. Spanning service desk, operations, asset management, security, and risk, autonomous IT eases the load for IT teams tasked with managing a large portfolio of digital systems, data, and workflows.

AI agents power autonomous IT, but they must be connected to data from every corner of enterprise. They can learn, reason, and act independently, freeing IT teams from monotonous, high-volume tasks and preventing unexpected disruptions. Let’s explore what autonomous IT can do for enterprise productivity.

What autonomous IT means for the enterprise

Autonomous IT marks a shift from reactive to proactive operations, empowering time-poor IT teams to pivot from a support function to a strategic driver of growth. Teams of AI agents can work around the clock, enabling employees to get back to the work that matters rather than waiting for the IT team to become available.

Automating operations frees up focus for transformation. Instead of responding to operational problems all day, your people can be redeployed to solve more complex IT tasks and drive new business value.

For example, IT managers can spend less energy on troubleshooting connection issues and instead focus on mission-critical initiatives for the enterprise, such as cyber security and data strategy.

Autonomous IT augments the IT team’s productivity but doesn’t replace it. AI agents can be easily deployed to troubleshoot everyday IT problems independently. As for high-stakes tasks, such as responding to a major security incident or managing a large data migration, a human employee can be kept in the loop to oversee or validate the AI agent’s output.

Self-securing networks and automated threat response add greater protection from cyber threats. In the case of a malware attack, the moment the threat is identified, the system can take immediate action autonomously.

After AI agents instantly quarantine the employee's device from the network, the rest of the organisation continues to operate securely and without interruption. By reducing downtime from an outage, AI agents help increase productivity while mitigating risk.

The autonomous IT imperative

As technology advances, organisations face the imperative to eliminate IT pain points that slow down productivity. Challenges such as system outages, downtime, and service desk incidents are blockers to employee efficiency.

Autonomous IT powered by AI agents can help IT teams anticipate the organisation’s needs and lower blocker rates towards zero. AI agents embedded across the organisation can work together to detect anomalies, identify impacted users, and analyse related alerts. This helps prevent small incidents from developing into significant outages that could affect employees downstream.

For example, if an AI agent detects a network issue, it can notify the affected employee and provide troubleshooting advice that guides them through steps to resolve the issue. This minimises disruption for both the employee and the IT worker who would need to field the support ticket.

Self-healing endpoints are another example of how autonomous IT frees up resources. When an employee's laptop starts slowing down due to low disk space or a malfunctioning application, they typically have to manually submit an IT support ticket and then wait for a technician to diagnose and resolve the issue.

In addition to draining employee productivity, this performance problem requires someone in IT to investigate and fix it.

In an autonomous IT environment, the performance issue on the machine triggers a pre-approved workflow to diagnose and fix the problem automatically. The process runs in the background—often before the employee even notices a significant performance dip—and the issue is resolved without needing to contact the help desk.

These examples underline why autonomous IT is an opportunity for IT teams to lean into AI-based automation to drive innovation and future business growth.

Autonomous IT in practice

Autonomous IT environments are possible only on a single AI platform that unites AI agents with human oversight, clean and accessible data, and clearly defined workflows.

The ServiceNow AI Platform makes autonomous IT a reality, bringing together any AI, any data, and any workflows on a single system of action. We’re helping thousands of organisations deploy, manage, and use AI agents that work for people instead of replacing them.

It is possible to achieve real business outcomes that shake the stigma of IT as a cost centre, turning it into a strategic partner for the enterprise.

ServiceNow AI Agent Orchestrator works as the central intelligence layer for IT to coordinate teams of AI agents that can proactively triage and handle IT issues. It’s supported by Workflow Data Fabric, which connects AI agents to business data from any source, while AI Agent Fabric lets ServiceNow AI Agents collaborate with third-party AI agents.

At a wider strategic level, ServiceNow AI Control Tower unites AI strategy, governance, and management in one place, connecting your AI initiatives to core business services and technology, measuring AI impact in real time.

The entire offering unites AI agents across IT Service Management, IT Operations Management, IT Asset Management, Strategic Portfolio Management, and risk and security to accelerate transformation at scale. Autonomous IT will drive growth for businesses, but this is possible only through working on a single platform., to accelerate transformation at scale. Autonomous IT will drive future growth for businesses, but this is only possible through working on a single platform.

Find out how ServiceNow can help you put AI to work with autonomous IT.

¹ Forrester, The State of the Service Desk 2024