INVESTMENT DRIVERS FOR Deploying AI

The interviewees’ organizations consolidated on the Atlassian platform as a centralized, integrated, and scalable ITSM solution and embraced its built-in AI capabilities with the following goals:

• Improve self-service support experiences. Interviewees wanted to connect employees to answers across channels, such as web, email, and help center. They sought to use AI to surface knowledge, draft accurate responses to common queries, and provide instant, conversational help to employees and customers at scale.
• Accelerate agent productivity. Reduced ticket volume combined with agent assist features like issue summarization, response generation, sentiment analysis, and recommended actions were implemented to help human agents work more efficiently.
• Uncover gaps in service to improve employee experience. Interviewees called out capabilities that allowed to automatically suggest relevant intents or template types based on historical request data to streamline the setup process.
• Streamline incident and change management. The interviewees’ organizations wanted to leverage AIOps to make smarter, more informed decisions to increase change velocity and service reliance.

AI Capabilities in Jira Service Management

After consolidating on the Atlassian platform and integrating end-to-end service management practices, the interviewees’ organizations chose to leverage the following AI-powered capabilities in Jira Service Management:

• Virtual service agent. Combining natural language processing and generative AI, the virtual service agent provided instant, conversational support, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex tasks and strategic projects. It enhanced support efficiency and deflected service requests by automating tier-one support interactions like password resets and software access requests, ensuring quick resolutions. Natural, human-like experiences resulted in ticket deflection and IT worker efficiency. 
  • The manager of production operations at the food delivery technology company said: “With Confluence linked to Jira Service Management, users now know where to find information. The platform automates repetitive tasks, including identity verification, password resetting, and notifying the requester.” The interviewee further explained: “Our legal team uses the virtual service agent feature to direct users to existing documentation, reducing the need for ticket creation. The virtual service agent helps you navigate the vendor hiring process by providing procedural guidance and legal information from the knowledge base.”
  • The director of IT operations with the home services firm noted: “Now, with the virtual service agent, we have 24/7 availability, responding to any question at any time. The virtual service agent also gathers initial information, ensuring that when a ticket is created, it already contains relevant details.”
  • The engineering director at the gaming and entertainment firm stated: “We started to use the virtual service agent internally within our IT operations team to allow them to make changes in the asset database without having to give them direct access to avoid the risks associated with manually poking around in the database.”

• Atlassian Intelligence. This capability included a range of generative AI features to help agents be more proactive. Atlassian Intelligence provided AI-generated summaries for teams to quickly understand the situation and take prompt action and assist with support responses, including sentiment analysis and response suggestions. IT operations employees saved time getting to the root cause of problems, responding to incidents, and streamlining change approvals with Jira Service Management.
  
  The director of IT operations at the home services firm explained: “The issue summaries feature has been a game-changer for us. When a ticket gets escalated and contains numerous comments, the ability to click a button and receive a bulleted summary of all actions and updates is invaluable.”
• AI for process automation. Forrester found that adopting AI capabilities improved escalation processes and cut average response times. Automation features streamlined task management, reducing the time spent by personnel on triage and repetitive tasks. Interviewees explained that the Atlassian platform tracked SLAs for different request types, ensuring timely resolution through automation and escalation rules. This visibility into ticket status improved cross-team communication, replacing the previously chaotic email and chat methods.
  
  The manager of global service management at the global restaurant chain said: “With Jira Service Management, configuring response and resolution times is effortless. Agents can easily see and track these times, and automation will notify them when they are close to exceeding their SLA. This has significantly improved our operations.”

Key Results For Using Jira Service Management’s AI and Virtual Service Agents

Forrester found that the implementation of the virtual service agent and additional AI features in Jira Service Management significantly accelerated productivity and process improvements across the interviewees’ organizations. This included reducing average time to resolution as well as enhancing end-user experiences and providing more resilient services.

The Forrester TEI study calculated the results of the Jira Service Management investment for a composite organization based on the rollout of virtual service agent capabilities in Year 2 of the analysis and the use of Atlassian Intelligence features in Year 3 of consolidating with Atlassian. Organizations could potentially realize benefits sooner due to embedded AI functionality across the platform.

The following quantified benefits were assessed for the composite organization:

• Improved service desk productivity. For the composite organization, the AI features in Jira Service Management significantly enhance service desk productivity by automating routine tasks and enabling self-service capabilities. These features reduce the volume of IT support requests by deflecting up to 30% of tickets through AI-driven, self-service options and knowledge base integration. Additionally, the virtual service agent provides instant responses and gathers initial information, streamlining the support process and reducing the need for human intervention. This automation improves ticket-handling efficiency by up to 30%, saving substantial time for service agents and allowing them to focus on more complex issues, ultimately enhancing overall productivity and service quality.

• Improved end-user productivity. Virtual service agents provide instant support for common request queries, enhancing end-user productivity at the composite organization. The integration of virtual service agents allows for automated provisioning and deprovisioning of access to applications, ensuring new employees have the necessary access from day one. This reduces downtime and enhances user satisfaction. Additionally, AI-driven features, such as automated escalation and prioritization of tickets, ensure timely resolution and further reduce wait times. These capabilities collectively save employees on average 25 minutes per request, allowing them to focus on more critical tasks and improving overall productivity.

• Improved IT operations team productivity with AIOps. The AI capabilities in Jira Service Management streamline processes and improve efficiency at the composite organization, enhancing the IT operations team’s productivity. AI-driven features such as issue summarization, provide concise summaries of escalated tickets, enabling the IT operations staff to quickly come up to speed on issues and take necessary actions. These capabilities and others collectively save IT operations an average of 55 minutes per incident, improving overall productivity and operational efficiency.

• Improved software engineer and decision-maker productivity. AI features also enhance productivity for the composite’s engineers and decision-makers. Capabilities like the summarize function provide concise summaries of escalated tickets, allowing engineers to quickly review and understand complex issues. This reduces the time spent on problem resolution and facilitates faster incident management. Additionally, AI-powered automation of child issue creation in Jira ensures comprehensive task documentation for larger projects, saving time and ensuring no critical tasks are overlooked. These capabilities collectively save engineers at the composite an average of 12 minutes per incident, improving overall productivity and enabling decision-makers to make more informed and timely decisions.

• Cost savings from retiring previous solutions. By switching to Jira Service Management, the composite organization eliminates its previous investment in license costs, labor, and ongoing maintenance from traditional service management solutions. After investing in Jira Service Management, the composite organization increases the number of service agents from 850 in IT to 1,200 across departments and realizes additional, measurable value from leveraging the Atlassian platform’s AI capabilities.

Please note that based on the current availability of AI features across the platform, the efficiencies realized in Years 2 and 3 of this analysis can be achieved sooner by incorporating virtual service agents and AI capabilities in earlier stages of the Jira Service Management deployment. Additional features not evaluated in this study may provide further benefits across these use cases in the future.