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Faced with economic headwinds, constrained IT budgets, lowering headcounts, and limited resources, modern IT teams need to leverage automation, self-service systems, and AI capabilities that help reduce complexity for agents and provide a helping hand.
To address increasing IT resource constraints in 2024, the global SolarWinds technology engineering team launched its AI by Design initiative (building off its existing Secure by Design principles) that lean into Privacy, Fairness, Transparency, and Accessibility as guiding principles that direct the company’s approach to AI development.
AI by Design was put into practice across the SolarWinds platform in February with the launch of AI in Service Desk, helping to empower IT teams with AI-guided incident solutions for agents, faster communications with AI generated responses, enhanced incident summaries to maximize collaboration, and self-service tools that help end-users to resolve their own issues.
Since then, Service Desk has already had a significant impact on SolarWinds customers. A survey found that after implementing SolarWinds Service Desk, respondents:
- Reported reducing the time it takes to resolve incident and service request tickets by an average of 23%, with some results as high as 45%
- Reported reducing the number of tickets submitted by an average of 21%, with some seeing a reduction of up to 42%, due to the AI features of Service Desk
- Saved customers an average of 23 hours per week due to few tickets
- Reported being able to handle 19% more tickets on average per agent
- Started seeing value on average 24 days after implementing
The SolarWinds engineering team then rolled out AI capabilities into the Observability platform’s offerings in October. This included smart alerts that reduce fatigue, accelerate incident management, and enable proactive troubleshooting. These updates also coincided with a new combined Database Observability license that supports the many AI-enabling system augmentations.
The initiative also led enhancements to Plan Explorer and updates for Database Performance Analyzer that help database pros improve operations, performance, and business outcomes in the face of exponentially increasing demand for AI and automation.
In order to move AI by Design forward across company culture, SolarWinds sponsored Accelerate, an organization-wide competition inviting employes to identify and pitch creative solutions or enhancements to the product portfolio and operations. The competition aims to foster collaboration and innovation while giving employees the chance to have their creative ideas heard and contribute to the SolarWinds mission of helping customers accelerate business transformation.
More than 70 ideas were submitted into this year’s competition from the Americas, EMEA, and APJ aimed at accelerating time to value, detection, remediation and customer-centricity. The ideas included everything from how SolarWinds could leverage AI to resolve customer support tickets more efficiently, to new API integrations with the SolarWinds Platform, and enabling VPC observability.
Finally, to better understand the IT industry’s attitudes towards AI, SolarWinds also developed its largest annual SolarWinds research report: 2024 IT Trends Report – AI: Friend or Foe?, which found that, among IT pros:
- 88% have adopted AI or plan to do so.
- 70% report that AI improves efficiency and productivity.
- 64% have developed internal frameworks to navigate AI challenges.
It’s clear that CIOs and their departments feel the daily pressure of having too much to do without enough time (or people) to handle it all. The SolarWinds AI by Design initiative addresses this challenge by enabling the company to provide more AI-powered algorithms and analysis that help customers’ IT teams become more effective at resolving problems and addressing complex challenges.
Nomination Title: The SolarWinds AI by Design Initiative
