Gartner defines artificial intelligence applications in IT service management as tools that augment and extend IT service management (ITSM) workflows using AI. These analyze ITSM data and metadata (primarily found in ITSM platforms) to provide intelligent advice and actions on ITSM practices and workflows, such as IT service desk and support activities. This software can either be a stand-alone product, capabilities within an ITSM platform or an add-on to an ITSM platform.
Gartner defines IT service management (ITSM) platforms as software that offers workflow management that enables organizations to design, automate, plan, manage, report on and deliver integrated IT services and related digital experiences. Supported practices include request, incident, problem, change, knowledge and configuration management, and case management, as well as interfaces for non-IT business needs. ITSM platforms are typically acquired as SaaS; however, they are also sold as on-premises deployments. I&O leaders select these solutions to be consumed by service desks and service operations, and are identifying opportunities for business workflows in other IT-adjacent departments.
Gartner defines the service orchestration and automation platform (SOAP) market as encompassing solution suites that deliver capabilities enabling organizations to manage workloads, workflows, resource provisioning and data pipelines across their technology landscapes. SOAPs enable infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders to design and implement business services. These platforms combine workflow orchestration, workload automation and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure. Increasingly, they are central to an organization’s ability to deploy workloads and to optimize deployments as a part of cost and availability initiatives. SOAPs expand the role of traditional workload automation by adapting to use cases that deliver and extend into data pipelines, cloud-native infrastructures and application architectures. These tools complement and integrate with DevOps toolchains to provide customer-focused agility, cost savings, operational efficiency and process standardization.