Nowadays, cloud and software-as-a-service buying sprees are giving companies more IT to manage than ever. A little help from artificial intelligence might help keep services from a budget-draining, time-consuming, confusing mutiny against users. 

Consider the overwhelming service catalogs of cloud providers like Amazon Web Services Inc. catering to customers building modern applications. The number of infrastructure resources and higher-level services, like Amazon SageMaker for ML models that go into a single app might be quite high. Luckily, these same services are making a new class of intelligent tools for service management possible, according to Ali Siddiqui (pictured), chief product officer of BMC Software Inc.

Siddiqui spoke with Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed BMC’s partnership with AWS and how AI is helping to produce service management for the new era of cloud and SaaS. (* Disclosure below.)

Talking out service issues with AI chatbot

AI service management not only helps IT pros proactively prevent problems in infrastructure and software services; it may also transform their workflows for all-around greater efficiency and contribute to agile innovation, according to Siddiqui.

“It really is the next gen, and it’s disrupting the traditional service-management industry,” he said.

AI service management is one part of a broader evolving domain called AI Ops — the use of AI to improve IT operations. AI tools can be used to discover what software assets a company has, which may include services they weren’t aware of that aren’t pulling their weight cost-wise. They can also be used for rapid root-cause discovery in the event of issues, to determine dependencies, etc.

BMC has partnered with AWS and uses the latter’s AI services in its offerings in AI service management and AIOps. It has brought out a comprehensive platform called the Autonomous Digital Enterprise. This is a unified platform covering observability, knowledge management and more. The word “autonomous” speaks to the use of automation in the technology, as well as the tools’ self-service models. ADE is not strictly for service management, but also offers “a way to grow revenue, to get more customer centric, increase employee engagement,” according to Siddiqui.

The BMC Helix Chatbot uses natural language processing to help IT pros do tasks such as manage cloud resources and submit service requests directly through chat in a mobile-friendly app. The AI Breakthrough Awards recently named Helix “Best Chatbot Solution.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: BMC Software Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither BMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE