The 3S approach to AI-driven resilient operations

Autonomous IT operations are a business reality, driving significant productivity and efficiency and making IT a change agent rather than a cost center.

What if your IT service operation could self-heal, self-service and self-adapt, all while improving quality, agility and innovation? Sound too good to be true? For enterprises willing to embrace artificial intelligence and set aside traditional silos, this lofty goal is within reach. AI is changing everything—in IT operations as in other facets of the business.

And it’s happening just in time. Today's enterprises face unprecedented complexity: multi-cloud, thousands of physical assets and generative AI predicted to create over a billion new applications. This scale is simply impossible for humans to manually comprehend and manage.

This is why AI-driven, autonomous operations are becoming essential.

• AI, including gen AI, is accelerating the reduction of manual work, making autonomous operations a reality.
  
  
• Infrastructure and operations activities are shifting from human-only to humans collaborating with intelligent machines.
  
  
• AI empowers engineering talent to leverage new tech trends, focused on improving operations efficiency and system reliability.

Businesses adopting AI in operations are already seeing the benefits. They’re transforming IT from a cost center into an agent of change, improving operations resilience and reliability.

Embracing AI for future-ready operations

By eliminating manual work, AI-powered IT operations reduce errors and waste while boosting efficiency. This approach requires a commitment to breaking down silos and agreeing on shared goals—goals that in the past may have been viewed as conflicting.

Let's explore our 3S approach to future-ready operations, as visually presented below:

Figure 1

1.    Self-serve

One of AI's key benefits is automating tasks, freeing humans for higher-value work. Intelligent automation can enable common requests and issues to be fulfilled digitally, often without human intervention. AI can autogenerate standard operating procedures and self-service content, which are then approved by subject matter experts. This empowers users and IT staff to resolve routine matters instantly with minimal manual effort.

2.    Self-heal

AI-driven systems transform operations by moving beyond traditional monitoring to true observability. While monitoring tracks known signals, observability uses AI to provide deep insights from vast data streams, allowing teams to understand system behavior and anticipate issues.

These systems continuously monitor applications and infrastructure for vulnerabilities and anomalies, automatically triggering pre-defined remediation actions. This proactive capability resolves problems before they impact users, significantly reducing downtime and manual intervention, making operations inherently more resilient.

3.    Self-adapt

Site reliability engineering (SRE) —the practice of using software tools to automate IT infrastructure tasks—is crucial for building resilience at modern scale and complexity. Organizations adopt SRE to deliver reliable products, focusing on business value and customer satisfaction. SRE helps manage operational risks by automating manual work and continuously improving reliability, performance, accountability and innovation.

A real-world example

AI has swept across the enterprise to the extent that our clients are experiencing real, and impressive, results. In one case, a retail leader was struggling with seven different enterprise application support organizations; the business faced a sprawling, unmanageable IT footprint.

We helped the client implement an observability/AIOps framework with Cognizant’s Neuro IT Operations framework. The outcome: enhanced productivity, improved system reliability and significant financial benefits. This demonstrates the tangible advantages possible with AI-powered IT operations.

Getting ready for AI-driven IT operations

So, what can business leaders do to get the organization started on the path to AI-driven IT operations? Here are keys from our experience with clients:

• Start small, scale fast. Begin with pilots. Ensure processes are valid before automating; you don’t want to automate a bad process at 10-times the speed.
  
  
• See it all clearly. Remove redundant systems and gain clear visibility across your tech stack. Understand which business processes rely on which IT services and applications.
  
  
• Map it all out. Know where your applications are hosted. This is essential for AI-enabled IT operations to diagnose issues, understand business impact and make dramatic improvements.

With these steps taken, it’s critical to address the human factor. AI isn't here to replace people; it's about human and machine collaboration. When AI augments self-service, self-healing and self-adapting optimization, and automates compliance and security, it frees humans to focus on strategy and direction, business performance management, automation control and solving complex exceptions.

The journey to AI-enabled IT operations has begun. It's no longer a distant vision, but a current reality transforming IT operations and development teams. By embracing AI, organizations can unlock unprecedented levels of productivity, innovation, flexibility and efficiency, ensuring their operations are truly resilient and ready for the future.