Talk of Artificial Intelligence is everywhere lately.  Many are afraid that it will decrease the relevance and necessity of humans in the workforce but have you considered the numerous benefits it can provide in terms of streamlining and optimizing our ITAM processes?  By being strategic in harnessing the power of AI, organizations can increase efficiency, reduce support and maintenance costs, and improve overall decision-making across all functional departments, not just ITAM.

How Can AI Increase Efficiency?

Have you been plagued by the lack of support staff as many ITAM professionals have?  AI can help!  By automating repetitive tasks and functions, AI can free up your team to focus on more cumbersome, hands on tasks. For instance, instead of tasking 2-3 employees with taking physical inventory, AI can scan and inventory all of your IT assets across the organization quickly, allowing your employees to focus on other tasks and functions like developing and monitoring policies, or building a business case to acquire a new tool. AI also reduces instances of employee error, task neglect, and inaccurate data or asset information that isn’t current. AI will not replace humans anytime soon, but it can replace us in certain mundane tasks and situations that don’t require critical thinking, which allows us to better use our time on organizational alignment and strategic decision making.

How Does AI Help Reduce Costs? And Isn’t This My Job?

Cost efficiency is one of the most important aspects of IT Asset Management.  Many of the projects we do, assets choose to manage, and decisions we make center around cost savings and cost avoidance. If AI is able to cut costs significantly, will IT Asset Managers still have value to the organization?  Yes, of course!  Some tools are able to analyze data on asset usage, identify underutilized software, and predict patch and maintenance needs before a failure occurs. But, while AI might be able to identify opportunities for software cost optimization, it can’t negotiate a more favorable contract with the inclusion of true-ups or negotiate for a no audit clause all together like a SAM can! 

Guess what else Artificial Intelligence Tools can’t do?  They can’t gather feedback and gain an understanding of the needs and mindsets of your end-users, department managers, and executives. The IT Asset Manager is still needed to manage the people assets and ensure that the mission of ITAM is aligning with the goals and drivers of the organization and its executive stakeholders. By taking some of the mundane, repetitive tasks like data and analysis and trend identification, or even just keeping track of license renewal dates off the ITAM’s plate, AI can allow ITAMs the time to increase their roles as champions of the organization’s IT efforts, ensuring proper Communication and Education of the needs of ITAM to the entire organization, as well as ensuring compliance with laws, regulations, and license terms and conditions… all things that can be contributed to cost avoidance or cost savings!

AI Can Be a Benefit to Other Teams in the Organization Too! Lead by Example!

By offering innovative solutions to streamline processes, improve accuracy, and minimize repetitive manual work, AI technologies can enhance strategic, informed decision making across the organization, for instance in Legal and Finance.  By automating data entry, reconciliation, and financial reporting, organizations can save time and reduce the risk of accounting errors.  Similar to the benefits of AI data analysis to ITAM, vast amounts of financial data can be analyzed in little time to identify trends, anomalies, errors, and provide valuable insights about the financial health of the organization, forecasting and budgeting needs, and risk management. 

In legal departments, AI can automate contract analysis, legal research, and document review tasks, or at least portions of these tasks.  Tools can quickly scan and analyze legal documents of any type and extract important information, saving your organization’s legal team hours of review.  This can benefit ITAM too because AI-Powered Contract Management Systems can identify risks and compliance issues by analyzing contracts to look for inconsistencies, missing clauses, missing definitions in the Terms and Conditions, etc. in all stages of negotiations and during the vendor relationship.  AI can also provide the starting point of research into new or pending laws and regulations that your organization must follow.

AI isn’t objectively good or evil. It’s all in how you plan for and use it!

Hopefully by now, I’ve made a pretty convincing argument for you to broaden your technology horizons, continue your ITAM education, and embrace learning about the benefits AI technologies can bring to your organization in terms of efficiency, cost optimization, and ultimately, organizational sustainability.  But as with all IT assets and tools that store, handle, or transfer our data, the decision to implement it into your environment and how should be considered carefully. Don’t forget your formal acquisition process!  Make sure you include relevant members of your organization, especially the legal and security team in your decision to deploy AI technology in your environment. 

Remember, as with all new technologies, for every benefit we find in terms of efficiency and securing our environments, hackers and bad actors can find one toward their goals too! Since AI systems rely on large amounts and various types of data to operate properly, we must be aware that malicious actors may be able to manipulate the AI algorithms and this gain entry to manipulate or populate inaccurate data into our repository and data centers.  The last thing your organization needs is regulatory fines, loss of revenue, damage to your reputation, and a loss of customer and employee trust due to an attempt to increase efficiency and optimize costs! 

Even in the most secure environments where the risk of a data breach is incredibly low, AI comes with other risks worth noting. Firstly, it could lead to employee negligence when it comes to data integrity or the AI algorithm may become biased as it learns from your organization’s historical data.  If left unchecked, the system could perpetuate or maybe even amplify a bias. This could lead to unfair or even discriminatory outcomes in areas of the organization where human, political issues, and employee morale are paramount, such as hiring, promoting, customer interactions, or acquisitions of IT assets and office equipment.  If implementing AI technologies to assist in areas of your organization like Recruiting, Human Resources, Customer Service, or Procurement, please ensure that there are human employees available to periodically verify the data analysis and tasks your tools are completing until these new processes are underway and mature.  

Also, depending on the tool, AI may produce too much data, or data that’s difficult to interpret or explain to executives and stakeholders, so we must have a way to control the quality, accuracy, and timeliness of the data generated, collected, and auto analyzed by our AI systems. ITAM and Security must proactively plan for, identify, and mitigate the risks of data privacy, inaccurate data, and managing risks related to biased historical or current data.

If your ITAM and Security teams are not fully educated and prepared on all the potential risks of implementing AI in your environment, please consult a Subject Matter Expert!  IAITAM has quite a few Members who are quickly becoming experts in this field of technology.  Once the new processes are fully implemented and running smoothly, review the data and tasks as needed.  For some organizations, quarterly is best, others might be best suited for an annual AI performance review model. Like many ITAM processes, choosing the level of management for AI will depend upon the needs and goals of your organization.