The UK's biggest Service Desk and ITSM show is done for another year. As ever, this year's SITS event at London Excel was buzzing. If you couldn't make it, here's a recap of some of the things that were going on.
There were new vendors and new faces. New gimmicks everywhere to draw people onto the 72 different vendor stands. But what remained the same was the many one-to-one conversations between practitioners (and with vendors) that really make the event worthwhile. It's the sharing of ideas that continues to draw people to SITS. And it's a great way to see the latest service management tech in one place.
…and what does Agentic AI mean to ITSM?
Last year there was plenty of talk about Generative AI (GenAI), but not much adoption at that time. Now, Generative AI has gained a sturdy foothold, and use of AI is rapidly expanding.
What’s new this year is the rise of agentic AI, which is different from GenAI. GenAI is reactive. GenAI is “Ask me a question and I’ll give you an answer”. Agentic AI doesn’t need to be prompted by the user; it can act autonomously. The shift in AI capability is from answers to alerts and actions. GenAI is information oriented. Agentic AI is goal oriented.
The goal could be notifying you about a situation (such as the early indicators of a major incident). Or, it could be to identify and act on a situation as it’s happening – which is good news for service desks (and end user productivity).
The general sense that I got was that people were intrigued by what agentic AI tools can do, but had concerns about letting AI act autonomously without human intervention. For most people, there's a big gap between where trust in AI is right now, and where it would need to be for agentic AI to be allowed to autonomously run elements of (or even all of) IT service management and IT operations.
As it stands, the happy medium is a human-in-the-loop mechanism; meaning an agentic AI will ask the relevant person to confirm before action is taken. E.g. “I’ve found an error condition that needs to be acted on, and I’ve identified that this action will solve it. Do you want me to go ahead?”
Human-in-the-loop validation provides the transparency required to gain trust. That means that once a certain capability has been seen working well a few times, it can be considered trustworthy and the Agentic AI can be allowed autonomy with regard to that particular scenario and action from that point onward. In this way, the footprint of fully autonomous capabilities increases over time – taking more and more routine operations tasks off the IT workload pile.
There were plenty of sessions for ITSM and MSP people to see at the six theatres. Last year's theatre headphones have been replaced by the Olyusei mobile app, which allowed people to listen to the speaker with their own mobiles and headphones. Let’s face it, it can be tough to hear what a speaker is saying over a PA system in a noisy space. It worked pretty well, albeit with a delay of a couple of seconds on the app. But what about people who didn’t bring their own headphones? I was lucky enough to be able to walk back over to my hotel to fetch mine. I imagine that many people weren’t able to do that.
Speaking of seminars, Hornbill customer Alex Cosma of Square Enix (winners of itSMF Service Innovator Award), presented alongside our own Pat Bolger - talking about their journey to a unified enterprise service ecosystem.
A unified service management solution enabled them to bring teams, services, knowledge, and customers together within a single platform that gives visibility of it all. They transformed the service experience, offering a compelling digital experience that customers love – and a shift in customer behaviour from 80% email to 90% portal interactions. With a greatly reduced transactional load, they created the capacity they needed to break out of the firefighting loop and really drive the expansion and optimisation of ESM. You can find out more about Square Enix's journey in this video:
AI is the shiny new thing, and many people are tempted to rush optimistically into buying AI tools. Misha Macinski from Pink Elephant’s presentation took a more results-focused perspective.
Does it help you solve a challenge you need to solve? Or is it just the shiny new thing that is captivating everyone’s attention? Peer pressure to follow the trends can be very compelling, but organisations can get stuck if they don't think it through properly first.
The answer (as it does with any tool selection) lies in knowledge and understanding: Knowing and understanding your organisation’s challenges. Knowing and understanding the solutions that are out there. To make a good tooling decision, these two things need to be put together in a meaningful way. Line-by-line RFP feature checklists are usually not very meaningful. Too many RFPs simply repeat the same, basic commodity features that all vendors have, taking focus away from the important, high level requirements.
Knowing what outcomes you’re looking for (and really understanding the challenges that stand in the way of achieving them) is the key. Looking at technology from the perspective of how tools can enable you to deliver those outcomes is far more powerful than a feature checklist. So if you’re taking your first steps to choosing a new ITSM or ESM solution, the first thing you should do is throw away the old RFP template. By taking an outcomes-based approach, you can get a better feel for how different types of outcomes flow across the technology.
For example:
At Hornbill, that’s how we approach the application of AI to ITSM and ESM. We focus on the key processes and experiences and think about how AI-powered features can be slotted-in to automate or augment what the person is doing.
Does it really matter what the mechanisms under the hood look like? At the end of the day, AI is just another mechanism to get to an outcome. Make sure what it does aligns with what you really need.
Once again, SITS included The MSP Show - expanding from around 30 stands last year to 74 this year. That's two more vendors than the ITSM area (although the MSP Show doesn't have so many of the really big and elaborate vendor stands). The MSP Show area was as busy as the main SITS area, so I can see this continuing to grow over the next few years. Last year there was one MSP theatre. This year there were three. Perhaps it will soon become its own dedicated MSP event.
If you're planning on visiting SITS 2026 next year, we look forward to meeting you there! If you were at SITS and didn't have time to come and talk to us, please get in touch at hello@hornbill.com.