What benefits does AI provide ITSM teams?

AI plays a significant role in IT service management (ITSM) by enhancing various aspects of IT operations and customer support, including: Automation: AI can automate routine tasks and processes , such as incident routing, password resets, and software updates. AI Service Desk Support: AI-powered service desk chatbots and virtual agents can provide 24/7 customer support, answer common IT-related questions, and assist with issue resolution. Predictive Analytics: AI can analyze historical data to predict potential IT issues or outages for proactive maintenance and minimal service disruptions. Knowledge Management: By extracting insights from documents, customer support tickets, and user interactions, AI can make it easier for IT teams to find relevant information. Self-Service Portals: AI-driven self-service portals enable users to troubleshoot and resolve common issues independently.

How does AI make a Service Desk solution better?

Using artificial intelligence in ITSM provides an array of benefits for businesses, including: Improved Efficiency: AI automates repetitive tasks and workflows, reducing IT teams' need for frequent manual intervention. Instead, they can direct their attention towards more complex and strategic activities. Better User Experiences: Easier and quicker online response times offered by AI-powered service desk chatbots and virtual agents leads to faster issue resolution and happier customers. Cost Reduction: Using artificial intelligence in ITSM can also result in better resource utilization and reduced labor costs. Performance Monitoring: AI-supported monitoring tools analyze system performance in real time, detect anomalies, and trigger alerts. Scalability: AI is designed to handle a high volume of inquiries and tasks simultaneously, making it easier to scale ITSM operations to meet growing demands.

What features in SolarWinds Service Desk contain AI?

Some of the main features of AI in Service Desk include: Suggested solutions: AI surfaces processes most likely to resolve the issue based on the content of the ticket, allowing swift decisions and process alignment. Draft responses: AI suggests text to send as a response with necessary information. Once the agent is ready to resolve the ticket, a draft resolution text can also be generated. Incident summary: With this feature, AI generates a short summary of all communication on a ticket so the new viewer can catch up quickly. Knowledge base: AI in Knowledge Base helps organize and recommend relevant articles. It uses natural language processing (NLP) to help insure accurate information is available. Virtual Agent: The virtual agent uses AI and NLP to engage with users in real-time through chat. It understands inquiries, provides responses, and can guide users through troubleshooting steps. It can also escalate issues to human agents. Self-service portal: Integrating AI-driven search capabilities, the portal allows users to easily find information, solutions, and resources.

How long has SolarWinds been using AI?

While our generative AI features have upgraded our Service Desk AI capabilities, SolarWinds has been using and developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) within its products for over 6 years now. In order to sustainably advance our AI and ML capabilities, our Secure by Design principles have guided our security and cyber resilience approach. Now, we’re extending this model to establish optimal practices around AI.

How is data, privacy, and confidentiality handled with SolarWinds AI?

SolarWinds is developed using Secure by Design in order to protect privacy and confidentiality within AI by restricting its scope within accounts, including between different service providers in our Enterprise Service Management (ESM) configurations. It is designed to adhere to the permissions set in the service desk, aligning with SolarWinds data security policy .

Put AI to work where IT teams need it most

Use SolarWinds Service Desk to guide incident resolution, improve ticket management, and help employees find answers faster.

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Explore AI service desk capabilities

Guide incident resolution

Improve ticket responses

Find related problems

Build useful runbooks

Improve self-service

Give agents a clearer starting point for resolution

Use AI-guided incident solutions to help agents decide what to investigate next.

When an incident arrives with incomplete context or an unfamiliar symptom, agents can lose time deciding where to begin. SolarWinds AI Service Desk can generate recommended troubleshooting and resolution steps from the initial request and ticket comments. Agents remain responsible for reviewing the guidance and applying it to the situation, but the suggested path can help create more consistency across incident management, ticket management, and day-to-day IT operations.

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Draft responses without starting from a blank screen

Ticket updates often require technicians to restate what happened, explain next steps, and give requesters a clear expectation for follow-up. SolarWinds AI Service Desk can generate a response based on the ticket context and the end user’s request. Agents can review, edit, and personalize the draft before sending it, helping them spend less time on repetitive writing while keeping a human accountable for the final communication.

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Spot recurring issues before they become repeat work

Related incidents can look like isolated tickets when teams do not have time to compare patterns across the service desk and IT operations environment. SolarWinds generative AI analyzes Service Desk incident data within the current account or service provider to find related issues and guide agents toward creating or linking problem records with useful context already in place.

This can help teams focus on root causes, reduce repeated investigation, and strengthen the connection between incident management, problem management, and operational visibility.

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Make complex ticket handoffs easier to follow

Long ticket threads can make handoffs, escalations, and collaboration slower than they need to be. SolarWinds AI can generate a concise summary of ticket comments and communications, helping agents identify relevant details without reading every update from the beginning. Whether a ticket moves between technicians, shifts to another team, or needs escalation, a summary can help the next person start with useful context and move toward resolution sooner.

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Turn process knowledge into usable runbooks

Many ITSM teams have process documentation spread across PDFs, Word files, and internal notes, making it difficult to turn that knowledge into guidance agents use during live support work. Premier customers can use SolarWinds AI to generate a draft runbook from an uploaded PDF, Microsoft Word document, or free text. Administrators must generate these runbooks, and the AI-generated Runbook feature must be enabled. Teams can edit, publish, and link the resulting runbook to tickets, creating a more consistent process for troubleshooting, resolution, and change-related work.

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Explore AI Service Desk use cases

See how AI can support agents, employees, and service teams across the service experience.

How can AI help agents resolve incidents?
How can AI improve incident and problem management?
How can AI improve the service portal and service catalog?
How can AI support IT asset management and CMDB data?
How can AI support change and release management?
How can AI improve enterprise service management (ESM)?
How does AI fit into responsible IT service management (ITSM)?

AI can give agents a useful starting point when they are handling a new or unfamiliar incident. SolarWinds AI Service Desk generates recommended steps based on the initial request and comments already captured in the ticket. The guidance is designed to help agents decide what to investigate or try next; it does not remove the need for technical judgment, validation, or escalation when an issue requires deeper expertise.

By bringing suggested resolution steps into the incident-management workflow, teams can reduce the time spent searching for an initial path and create more consistency in how common issues are approached. This can be especially helpful for IT operations teams managing high ticket volume, distributed services, or work that requires coordination across service owners. AI-assisted guidance becomes more useful when the team’s knowledge articles, service processes, and escalation paths are current and well understood.

AI can give agents a useful starting point when they are handling a new or unfamiliar incident. SolarWinds AI Service Desk generates recommended steps based on the initial request and comments already captured in the ticket. The guidance is designed to help agents decide what to investigate or try next; it does not remove the need for technical judgment, validation, or escalation when an issue requires deeper expertise.
By bringing suggested resolution steps into the incident-management workflow, teams can reduce the time spent searching for an initial path and create more consistency in how common issues are approached. This can be especially helpful for IT operations teams managing high ticket volume, distributed services, or work that requires coordination across service owners. AI-assisted guidance becomes more useful when the team’s knowledge articles, service processes, and escalation paths are current and well understood.