Measuring the value of AI in ITSM

Martin Stewart - Jul 19, 2024

Quantifying the value of AI in ITSM is easier than you think. Hornbill Service Manager includes a unique AI Value Dashboard—giving you a clear view of AI usage and savings at the click of a button.

Some organizations are aggressively pro-technology. They want to get the edge that a new technology can give them. Others are more reserved. They want to see the proof first. Both types of organization are right. Their appetite for innovation fits their business context. These different attitudes are illustrated by the classic Technology Adoption Life Cycle bell curve.

As it stands most organizations are still sceptical about how the value of AI measures up against the cost. Recent research shows that 71% of organizations are still only considering or experimenting with AI in ITSM . They’re asking questions: How much will AI cost us? Is it worth it? They’re right to do so.

Cost and value in the ITSM space

In the ITSM arena, the cost of AI is nowhere near the extremes that we see for the AI giants like OpenAI (ChatGPT 4 cost $100m to train). For most ITSM/ESM vendors, the cost of AI features is simply added on as a percentage of the existing license cost. The cost is measurable. But the value is not universally quantified by vendors.

Current customers of ITSM tools that incorporate AI really want to quantify the ROI they’re getting. Prospective customers want to know the ROI they will get.

How to measure the value of AITSM

How AI in ITSM can deliver value in principle is well understood (replacing human tasks and interactions with machine interactions). How much is a trickier question to answer. But it is possible.

The application of AI within ITSM makes it easy to automate many diverse types of tasks. Human tasks become machine tasks. Human interactions become machine interactions.

Where there is a good understanding of the tasks/interactions we’re automating with AI (and how many times they occur) we can calculate the total time saved—which we then multiply by the cost of time to get an ROI figure. In theory, it’s that simple. In practice—because there may be many different tasks (each with a different amount of time saved)—it’s not so easy to do.

There are two ways of doing this:

Manually trawl through ITSM system data to find every instance where AI did a previously human task. Perhaps helped by a spreadsheet or business intelligence tool to analyse the data. But AI is supposed to be about automating human tasks—not creating more, isn’t it?
Have your ITSM solution do it for you.

Hornbill offers a unique view of AI ROI

Hornbill makes measuring and reporting the ROI of AITSM simple. It does the hard work for you. Our HAi Value Dashboard is a unique feature which automatically monitors AI usage and does the calculations to tell you what you need to know about time and cost savings. We can do this because AI is fully integrated into the Hornbill product.

Hornbill AI Value Dashboard

The HAi Value Dashboard tells you about your organization’s usage over time, as well as who are your most active users. These are your AI champions—the people who will advocate for greater adoption across your teams. Driving adoption is the key to maximizing ROI. The more people who use it, the more time your teams will save. The more time they can shift from operational tasks to projects and innovations.

It's preconfigured with sensible figures (e.g. hourly rates based on industry averages)—so you can use it straight away—but you can also edit the parameters to fit your own organization. So, if you want an accurate, up-to-date view of the ROI of AI, you get a clear visualization at the click of a button.