IPsoft wants to put a digital face on the future of IT operations that will be infused by artificial intelligence (AI). Its recently launched 1Desk service desk combines the Amelia digital assistant with IPsoft’s Apollo virtual engineer technology to automate multiple backend processes.
Allan Anderson, director of enterprise solutions for IPsoft, says 1Desk effectively combines two longstanding areas of IPsoft research to provide IT organization with an ability to manage IT at scale using digital personal assistants and virtual engineers.
IPsoft has been providing managed services based on its Apollo AI framework for several years. The launch of 1Desk creates an opportunity for IT organizations to not only employ that AI framework on their own, but also combine it with a digital assistant technology christened Amelia that IPsoft has trained to handle a variety of technology and business process requests.
Anderson says the virtual engineer AI technology developed by IPsoft make use of machine learning algorithms to continually monitor how humans complete a task. Armed with that data, those virtual engineers can then incorporate that information into their knowledge base to learn a process or fine-tune an existing one.
A continuing shortage of IT skills in key areas is significantly reducing resistance to AI technologies being applied inside IT organizations—AI technologies may enable organizations of almost any size to operate IT environments at unprecedented levels of scale while minimizing human errors. IPsoft, says Anderson, expects virtual engineers to be employed as a digital labor force capable of performing tasks such as identifying and killing a long-running query to configuring and executing runbooks across the most complicated data center environments. To facilitate the automation of the those processes, IPsoft has developed a Digital Labor Studio tool that organizations can use to create and train a virtual agent.
There’s no doubt that many of the tasks associated with managing an IT environment are repetitive. In fact, any repetitive IT task is arguably a ripe candidate for automation. How those advances will impact DevOps processes remains to be seen. It’s not difficult to imagine that each development team will be assigned its own digital assistant. The role of the IT operations staff then would evolve into one where a smaller group of people train and manage a pool of digital labor.
IT professionals are generally used to the idea that IT will be used to automate a task that used to be part of someone else’s job. But now IT is being used to automate many of the tasks performed by IT professionals. It may take some time for them to first accept that idea and then evolve their skills accordingly. There will also be a need for some level of human involvement when it comes to IT. But instead of thinking in terms of managers and administrators, perhaps the brave new world will be one where everyone in IT is now the manager of their own digital force of labor.
— Mike Vizard
