Tickets as we used to know them are a relic of the past. From concerts to sporting events to airline flights, electronic ticketing is largely the norm as paper tickets steadily disappear.

When a user has to “open a ticket” with an information technology service desk, the work order is usually machine driven anyway. Do humans still need to be involved? One entrepreneur is betting that the IT service desk is ready for the next wave of automation.

“We’re living in the age of what I call autonomous everything,” said Muddu Sudhakar (pictured), investor and entrepreneur. “IT operations is a very big piece, and people need to figure out how to get the cost out of it. You have to run your IT in an autonomous manner.”

Sudhakar spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed pursuit of a more autonomous IT operation and future changes in the tech world, including cloud consolidation (see the full interview with transcript here).

AI help desk solutions

Autonomous operations are a familiar area for Sudhakar, who has been founding and selling Silicon Valley startups with notable success. In 2015, he sold Caspida Inc., which used machine learning to identify security threats, to Splunk Inc. for $190 million. Previous buyers of his companies include EMC and VMware Inc.

The entrepreneur is currently working with Aisera Inc., provider of an artificial intelligence help desk and customer service solutions to enterprises. “IT can be so complex,” Sudhakar said. “A car can be autonomous, but IT cannot be? I don’t buy that.”

The pursuit of IT service desk automation offers the possibility that users seeking an upgrade for Microsoft Office or provisioning of a communications tool like that from Zoom Video Communications Inc. will no longer need to speak with a human. The process will become fully automated.

“Why do I need to talk to a human being in this equation?” Sudhakar asked. “That should be automated. It should be driverless IT.”

In an increasingly multicloud world, the entrepreneur forecasts other major changes, including consolidation among cloud providers. “At the end, when the dust settles, you won’t have 100 aircraft carriers,” Sudhakar said. “You’ll have only four or five.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE