IT Management
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See also: IT Management ChatGPT Plugins
IT management, sometimes broken out into IT service management (ITSM) and IT operations (ITOps), is the set of practices, tools, and people that keep an organisation's information technology running. Modern IT management absorbed machine learning for things like alert correlation, anomaly detection, and capacity forecasting under the banner of AIOps starting around 2017, then went through a second, much louder revolution in 2023 when generative AI and large language models made it possible to summarise incidents, draft post-mortems, query telemetry in plain English, and run virtual agents that resolve a meaningful slice of help-desk tickets without a human in the loop.
By 2025 every major IT vendor had shipped some form of AI assistant or agent, and the ServiceNow acquisition of Moveworks for $2.85 billion (announced 10 March 2025) made clear that the agentic AI layer over the service desk had become a real category rather than a feature. This article surveys how AI is used in IT management today, the platforms doing the work, and the failure modes that have already shown up in production.
IT management combines a few historically separate functions that AI has been steadily pulling together:
The consolidating force across these silos is the assistant layer, a conversational front end that reads telemetry, runs queries, drafts text, and in the more recent agentic systems, takes actions in the underlying platforms. Most enterprise rollouts started in 2023 or 2024, so the field is still figuring out the right scope, the right pricing model, and the right safety controls.
The phrase AIOps was coined by Gartner around 2016 to describe platforms that apply machine learning to IT operations data. The first generation of products focused on event correlation: ingest millions of alerts from monitoring systems, cluster them into a smaller number of meaningful incidents, and route the right ones to the right team. Moogsoft (founded 2012) and BigPanda (founded 2012) were the canonical early entrants. Established APM vendors like Splunk added ML features to their existing analytics tools, and Dynatrace embedded its Davis AI engine across the platform.
The second wave began with the ChatGPT launch in November 2022, which forced every IT vendor with a roadmap to add a chat assistant. The earliest commercial implementations appeared in spring 2023:
ServiceNow's Vancouver release on 29 September 2023 was the first ITSM platform to ship a generative AI feature into general availability rather than into preview. The Washington, DC release in March 2024 made Now Assist for ITSM, CSM, and HRSD broadly available with summarisation, knowledge generation, and code generation skills. By late 2024 the conversation had moved from chatbots to agents: ServiceNow added the Now Assist Skill Kit and a library of pre-built AI Agents at World Forum events in autumn 2024, Atlassian shipped its Rovo agents into general availability on 9 October 2024, and Salesforce, BMC, Freshworks, and Pega all began describing themselves as agentic platforms.
The two largest deals reshaped the competitive map. Cisco announced its $28 billion acquisition of Splunk on 21 September 2023 and closed it on 18 March 2024. IBM agreed to buy HashiCorp on 24 April 2024 for $6.4 billion in cash and closed the transaction on 27 February 2025. ServiceNow announced its $2.85 billion acquisition of Moveworks on 10 March 2025, completing it on 15 December 2025.
ITSM copilots are the most visible category because they sit directly inside the ticketing tool that IT staff already use.
ServiceNow is the dominant enterprise ITSM platform, with roughly 8,400 enterprise customers as of 2025. The company unveiled the Now Assist family at the Vancouver release on 20 September 2023 and made the first generative AI skills generally available in the ServiceNow Store on 29 September 2023. The Washington, DC release of March 2024 turned Now Assist for ITSM, Customer Service Management, and HR Service Delivery into broadly available products with skills for case summarisation, resolution suggestions, knowledge article generation, and chat-based search.
The Yokohama release in 2024 introduced the Now Assist Skill Kit, a low-code tool for building custom GenAI skills against the platform's domain-specific Now LLM. Late in 2024 ServiceNow began shipping pre-built AI Agents for tasks like deflecting password resets, triaging incidents, and drafting change requests. Pricing is the same SKU model the company uses for Performance Analytics and Predictive Intelligence: per-user-per-month uplifts on Pro Plus, Enterprise Plus, and now Workflow Data Fabric tiers.
Atlassian added Atlassian Intelligence to Jira and Confluence on 19 April 2023, initially as a waiting-list beta in cloud-only deployments. The features included natural-language summaries of pages, automated test plans in Jira Software, and rewriting of customer responses in Jira Service Management. The deal with OpenAI provided the underlying language models.
At Team '24 on 1 May 2024, Atlassian launched Rovo, a new AI teammate that combines enterprise search across Atlassian and third-party SaaS tools with a library of agents that automate workflows. Rovo reached general availability on 9 October 2024 at Team '24 Europe in Barcelona. Pricing was set at $20 per user per month on annual subscriptions and $24 per user per month for monthly billing, with consumption pricing later. At Team '25 the company reported Rovo had reached three million monthly active users and made baseline Rovo features available to all paid Atlassian users.
BMC, the former mainframe and ITSM heavyweight that went private in 2018, rebuilt its Helix platform around an agentic AI framework called BMC HelixGPT. The framework hosts persona-based agents like the HelixGPT Vulnerability Resolver and the HelixGPT Best Action Planner, runs across BMC Helix Service Management, Helix Operations Management, and Helix Discovery, and can be deployed on-premises or in cloud environments using the customer's preferred LLM (OpenAI, Microsoft Azure OpenAI, or Google Vertex AI). BMC's customer base is heavy in financial services, telecoms, and regulated public sector, where the on-prem option matters.
Freshworks layered its own AI brand, Freddy, across Freshservice (ITSM), Freshdesk (CX), and Freshsales (CRM). The Freddy AI Copilot launched as a free beta in mid-2023, then became a paid add-on at $29 per agent per month starting 5 February 2024. Late in 2024 Freshworks shipped Freddy AI Agent, a customer-facing autonomous agent that handles routine tickets and was credited with up to 50% deflection rates by early adopters. Freshworks's pitch is smaller and faster than ServiceNow or Atlassian, aimed at mid-market IT teams that want AI without a multi-quarter integration project.
Ivanti Neurons for ITSM added generative summarisation, ticket classification, and self-healing bots, with a fuller persona-based agentic experience entering customer preview in Q1 2026. SolarWinds expanded its AI features under the SolarWinds AI Service Agent brand. Zendesk announced Zendesk AI at Relate 2023 in May 2023 and has since rolled it into a separate Zendesk AI Advanced add-on aimed at customer-facing teams. Although Zendesk is more often associated with CX than ITSM, many small IT organisations use Zendesk as their internal help desk.
AIOps platforms ingest events and telemetry from monitoring tools and apply ML to compress, correlate, and prioritise them. The classic problem is alert storms: a single failed router can produce tens of thousands of downstream alerts, and the operations team needs one ticket, not a flood.
| Platform | Vendor | Founded / launched | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moogsoft | Dell (acquired Sept 2023) | 2012 | Pioneer of event correlation AIOps. Dell announced acquisition 19 July 2023, closed 17 September 2023. Moogsoft had raised more than $92 million from venture investors before the deal. |
| BigPanda | BigPanda (private) | 2012 | Series D of $190 million in January 2022 led by Advent International and Insight Partners at a $1.2 billion valuation. Focuses on incident intelligence and automation. |
| Splunk IT Service Intelligence (ITSI) | Cisco (acquired Splunk March 2024) | 2015 (ITSI launch) | ML for adaptive thresholds, anomaly detection, and predictive incident prevention up to 30 minutes ahead. |
| Splunk AI Assistant for SPL | Cisco/Splunk | June 2024 GA | Natural-language to Search Processing Language; later extended to Splunk Enterprise via cloud-connected option. |
| Dynatrace Davis and Davis CoPilot | Dynatrace | Davis 2017, CoPilot announced 25 July 2023, GA 10 October 2024 | Hypermodal AI combining predictive, causal, and generative AI on a single platform. |
| PagerDuty AIOps and PagerDuty Advance | PagerDuty | AIOps 2019, GenAI features 2024 | Operations Cloud claims an 87% incident reduction for AIOps customers. Advance bundles AI Assistant, AI status updates, AI postmortems, and Automation Co-Author. |
| LogicMonitor Edwin AI | LogicMonitor | June 2024 | Agentic AIOps platform announced at Collision 2024 in Toronto on 18 June. Marketed as reducing alert noise by up to 80%. |
| ScienceLogic SL1 with Skylar AI | ScienceLogic | SL1 long-standing, Skylar AI 2024 | Adds GenAI assistants for incident analysis on top of the SL1 platform. |
| IBM AIOps (Cloud Pak for Watson AIOps, later Instana) | IBM | 2020 onward | Built on Watson and the Instana observability platform IBM acquired in 2020. |
AIOps platforms now compete heavily with the observability platforms below, which have added similar correlation and AI features inside their own UIs.
Observability platforms collect logs, metrics, traces, and other telemetry from applications and infrastructure. The generative AI race here started in May 2023 and is still being run.
| Product | Vendor | Launch | Capability |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bits AI | Datadog | 3 August 2023 beta | Conversational assistant for question answering, incident management, and code fixes; expanded with Bits AI SRE agent in October 2024. |
| New Relic AI (formerly Grok) | New Relic | 2 May 2023 | Industry-first GenAI observability assistant; uses OpenAI LLMs and the New Relic telemetry data platform. |
| Query Assistant | Honeycomb | 3 May 2023 | First fully executing natural-language querying for observability, built on OpenAI. |
| Davis CoPilot | Dynatrace | Announced 25 July 2023, GA 10 October 2024 | Generative AI assistant for Dynatrace Query Language; converts plain English to DQL and builds dashboards and notebooks. |
| Mo Copilot | Sumo Logic | 2024 | Conversational AI inside the Sumo Logic platform; query generation, summarisation, and chart suggestions. |
| Sentry Seer and Autofix | Sentry | Autofix launched March 2024 | AI debugging agent that reads stack traces, locates the root cause, and drafts a code fix. Sentry rebranded the suite as Seer in 2024. Sentry uses OpenAI and Anthropic models. |
| Grafana Cloud AI | Grafana Labs | Throughout 2024 | LLM-powered features across Grafana Cloud including query suggestions and incident reports. |
| Elastic AI Assistant | Elastic | 2023 onward | GenAI assistant for Elasticsearch and the Observability and Security solutions. |
| Splunk AI Assistant for SPL | Cisco/Splunk | 11 June 2024 GA | Generates SPL queries from natural language and explains Splunk concepts. |
Observability and AIOps are converging quickly. Datadog now positions Bits AI SRE as a full incident-management agent; Dynatrace's Davis CoPilot crosses observability, security, and application security; Splunk under Cisco has rolled together AI Assistant for SPL, Splunk SOAR automation, and Splunk ITSI under the same brand. Customers buying any of these platforms in 2025 are usually buying the AI layer with it.
Networking has been quietly applying machine learning since the early 2000s under names like adaptive radio resource management. Modern Network AI focuses on three things: wireless performance, troubleshooting that crosses the wired/wireless/SD-WAN boundary, and a conversational front end for network engineers.
Cisco is the largest networking vendor by revenue. Its AI strategy spans several brands: the Cisco AI Assistant for Webex collaboration; ThousandEyes AI for digital experience monitoring (Cisco bought ThousandEyes in 2020 for around $1 billion); Cisco Networking Cloud AI Assistant for Meraki and Catalyst products; and Cisco AI Defense for security. At Cisco Live 2024 in Las Vegas the company announced new AI-powered innovations across collaboration, networking, and security, including an expanded Cisco AI Assistant and tighter integration between ThousandEyes and the Webex devices. The $28 billion Splunk acquisition extended the AI story into observability and security operations.
Juniper Networks bought Mist Systems in April 2019 for $405 million in cash and assumed equity awards. Mist had pioneered an AI-native wireless LAN architecture and introduced the conversational assistant Marvis in 2018, before LLMs were a category. After the acquisition Juniper extended Mist AI across its wired switching and SD-WAN portfolio (Juniper acquired SD-WAN vendor 128 Technology in 2020). HPE agreed to buy Juniper for $14 billion in January 2024 and the deal closed in July 2024 after the US Department of Justice settled antitrust concerns by requiring divestitures. Mist AI is now the centre of HPE's AI-native networking story alongside HPE Aruba Networking Central.
HPE Aruba Networking expanded its AIOps capabilities throughout 2024 by integrating multiple generative AI LLMs inside HPE Aruba Networking Central. Releases in September 2024 added AI-powered security observability, third-party device monitoring (using OpsRamp, another HPE acquisition), behavioural analytics for network detection and response, and a generative AI search experience. HPE's training data lake includes telemetry from more than 4.6 million network-managed devices and more than 1.6 billion unique client endpoints.
Arista Networks launched AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist) in 2021 as a security-and-network AI platform built partly on the Awake Security technology Arista acquired in 2020. AVA Sensor inspects packet metadata, applies entity behavioural analysis, and feeds the results into the CloudVision management platform. Arista positions AVA as an alternative to traditional SIEM for network-first organisations.
DriveNets, an Israeli network software vendor, used machine learning for capacity planning across its disaggregated network operating system; the company became one of the named providers powering AI training networks for hyperscalers. Several startup network AI vendors (Selector AI, NetBrain, Forward Networks) compete on intent-based networking, change verification, and digital twin simulation.
The security operations centre (SOC) was one of the first IT functions to feel labour-market pressure, and it was an obvious target for GenAI assistants. The platforms below are positioned more for security than IT, but in most enterprises the SOC reports up through IT.
Microsoft Copilot for Security reached general availability on 1 April 2024 as a consumption-priced service billed in Security Compute Units (SCU) at roughly $4 per hour. Microsoft positions it as the assistant layer over the Defender XDR suite, Microsoft Sentinel SIEM, Entra ID, and Intune endpoint management. Microsoft cites a study showing experienced analysts working 22% faster on common tasks while increasing accuracy by 7% when using Copilot. The product supports prompts in eight languages and a multilingual interface in 25 languages.
CrowdStrike introduced Charlotte AI on 30 May 2023 and made it broadly available with the Raptor Falcon platform release at Fal.Con 2023 in September 2023. Charlotte is built on the Falcon data lake and powered by Amazon Bedrock underneath. CrowdStrike later shipped Charlotte AI Detection Triage and Charlotte AI Agentic Response, agentic features that triage detections and suggest containment actions. Charlotte sits inside the Falcon console and accepts natural-language questions in English and dozens of other languages.
SentinelOne launched Purple AI on 24 April 2023 in early access and made it generally available on 9 April 2024. Purple AI runs queries in PowerQuery (SentinelOne's own language), generates investigation summaries, and recommends next steps. SentinelOne later rebranded Purple AI as an autonomous SOC analyst, framing it as moving beyond an assistant into agentic threat hunting.
The employee-facing help desk has been a magnet for AI because so much of its work is repetitive: password resets, software requests, distribution-list changes, onboarding tasks, and questions that boil down to looking up a knowledge article. Pre-GenAI vendors built virtual agents on intent classification and dialogue trees; the GenAI generation runs on LLMs and retrieval-augmented generation against the customer's knowledge base.
Moveworks was the canonical pre-GenAI employee-experience AI company. Founded in 2016 by Bhavin Shah and Vaibhav Nivargi, it raised about $315 million across five rounds, including a $200 million Series C in 2021 that valued the company at $2.1 billion. Moveworks's pitch was an AI assistant that sat inside Slack, Microsoft Teams, or the browser and resolved a meaningful share of IT, HR, and facilities tickets autonomously. Customers included Hearst, Instacart, Siemens, Toyota, and Unilever.
ServiceNow announced its agreement to buy Moveworks on 10 March 2025 for $2.85 billion in cash and stock, the largest acquisition in ServiceNow's history. The deal closed on 15 December 2025 after regulatory review. ServiceNow's stated plan is to combine Moveworks's conversational AI front end and enterprise search with the Now Platform's workflow and execution layer, effectively giving every ServiceNow customer a fully built employee assistant rather than expecting them to assemble one from Now Assist skills.
Espressive's Barista virtual support agent has been on the market since 2017. Aisera (founded 2017 in Palo Alto by Muddu Sudhakar and Christos Tryfonas) markets an AI service desk and AIOps platform with persistent emphasis on autonomous resolution; the company raised about $90 million in a 2022 Series D and continued to add customers in 2023 and 2024. Cognigy, based in Düsseldorf, focuses on customer-experience contact centres but is used inside IT for internal help desks at some European enterprises. Each of these vendors has been forced to redefine itself in a market where Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Atlassian are giving away conversational assistants as part of existing seats.
Configuration management and infrastructure as code are different beasts from ITSM. Adoption of AI here is mostly about code generation, not ticket handling.
The hyperscalers each shipped a conversational front end for IT operators on their own clouds.
Each of these AI assistants is implicitly part of the cloud-management lock-in story. A Q-built workflow only runs on AWS, a Gemini agent only knows Google Cloud, and the SRE who learns Microsoft Copilot for Azure is one step further from being able to switch.
The consolidation wave from late 2023 through 2025 was the biggest in IT management since the early 2010s.
| Deal | Acquirer | Target | Announced | Closed | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mist Systems | Juniper Networks | Mist Systems | 25 March 2019 | 1 April 2019 | $405 million |
| Moogsoft | Dell Technologies | Moogsoft | 19 July 2023 | 17 September 2023 | Not disclosed |
| Splunk | Cisco | Splunk | 21 September 2023 | 18 March 2024 | $28 billion |
| Juniper Networks | HPE | Juniper Networks | 9 January 2024 | 2 July 2024 (close) | $14 billion |
| HashiCorp | IBM | HashiCorp | 24 April 2024 | 27 February 2025 | $6.4 billion |
| Moveworks | ServiceNow | Moveworks | 10 March 2025 | 15 December 2025 | $2.85 billion |
IBM's HashiCorp deal faced a phase-one review by the UK Competition and Markets Authority that concluded on 25 February 2025 without referral to a phase-two investigation. Cisco's Splunk deal closed in only six months. HPE's Juniper deal cleared the US Department of Justice after agreeing to specified divestitures.
The single most cited cautionary tale in the AI-meets-IT-Ops conversation is the CrowdStrike Channel File 291 incident on 19 July 2024. A faulty Rapid Response Content update to the Falcon Sensor on Windows triggered a kernel-mode crash that put roughly 8.5 million Windows systems into a bootloop. Airlines, banks, hospitals, broadcasters, retailers, and governments were all affected; CrowdStrike's own root cause analysis attributed the failure to an out-of-bounds memory read in the Windows sensor client triggered by Channel File 291, which had passed validation only because of a bug in the content verification software. The incident was not caused by generative AI, and the Falcon Sensor itself is largely a machine-learning EDR product, but it became the prototype example of what happens when an autonomous IT-operations agent makes a wrong call at scale. CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz testified before the US Congress on 24 September 2024. The incident accelerated regulatory interest in change management for security agents and reset expectations about how much automation enterprises will trust in production.
Other recurring concerns include: