ITSM in 2025 – What You Need to Know

IT and IT service management (ITSM) are facing their biggest transformation in decades, and at the center of it all is Agentic AI.

Our new SysAid State of Service Management report, The Rise of Agentic AI in ITSM: 2025 Mega-Trends Shaping the Future of IT Service Management, surveyed over 1,200 IT professionals across industries, regions, and seniority levels – 42% of whom hold decision-making roles. What we found confirms what many IT leaders already feel: IT isn’t just about fixing IT issues anymore. Instead, it’s about forecasting, preventing, and driving business outcomes.

In this blog and another coming soon, we highlight key survey findings, starting with how expectations for Agentic AI are reshaping ITSM.

Expectations of Agentic AI are high

Agentic AI is the definitive ITSM trend for 2025. IT organizations no longer just want AI to assist. Instead, they want it to execute, resolve, and optimize IT workflows autonomously. Specifically, our State of Service Management survey found that 52% of IT leaders say automating responses to recurring issues is the capability they want most from the next wave of Generative AI (GenAI).

When we asked IT leaders about their top wishes for the IT service desk in 2025, the answers were clear:

• 23% want Level 1 issues fully resolved without human intervention
• 22% need routine tasks built and executed automatically
• 21% hope AI can suggest the correct ticket categories right from the start.

In short, IT teams don’t just want support, they want smart, self-driving service desks that can keep pace with the business.

We believe that the future of ITSM is autonomous, adaptable, and insight-driven. Where AI agents go beyond executing predefined tasks to dynamically analyze, decide, and act based on real-time data and operational context. AI offers a wealth of opportunities in ITSM. However, your organization must realize the operational and benefit “gulf” between GenAI and Agentic AI capabilities, whether related to your existing ITSM solution or during the search for a replacement.

The ITSM priorities that matter most in 2025

Hybrid work patterns have made IT support more complex, with IT service desks requiring flexible, always-available, and often automated solutions that match the ease of contacting a traditional IT support capability for assistance.

As shown in the chart below, 38% of survey respondents planned to use AI to address this and other ITSM challenges, a huge 26% increase year over year. AI adoption is now the primary ITSM priority, surpassing needs relating to reporting and insights (which AI can help with, too, of course).

What are your top three service desk goals for 2025?

Agentic AI (and GenAI before it) makes it easier for your organization to introduce and benefit from AI capabilities. There is a wealth of opportunities that include:

• Real-time analytics and insights – AI agents can process vast amounts of data across systems in real-time to identify anomalies, surface trends, and generate actionable insights.
• Proactive problem detection – AI agents can detect potential problems before they escalate using continuous monitoring and predictive modeling. They can also trigger preventative actions automatically.
• Simulating and testing solutions – AI agents can evaluate multiple potential resolutions by simulating outcomes and analyzing the cost, time, and impact. Enabling your IT teams to choose the most effective course of action.

Enabling better ITSM operations and outcomes with ITSM solutions

While the ITSM industry is awash with people stating that good service management comes from people, process, and technology (and in that order), there’s no doubt that, even before AI capabilities became available, ITSM tools or platforms facilitated much of what’s achieved through ITSM best practices.

As shown in the pie chart below, when survey respondents were asked about what’s most important when considering ITSM solutions, the top three factors were:

• Ease of use (63%)
• Security (56%)
• Cost-effectiveness (52%).

When evaluating an ITSM solution, what factors do you consider?

These three factors are commonly called “non-functional requirements” during ITSM solution selection. They may even be “playing second fiddle” to a wealth of ITSM-process-based requirements, such as the ability to reopen a closed incident ticket, in corporate request for proposal (RFP) documents. However, our survey data rightly recognizes their criticality. So, ensure that the importance of these needs is reflected in your next ITSM solution selection initiative (or the assessment of your ITSM solution status quo).

Another key ITSM solution evaluation factor is operational automation – for example, the use of automation in IT asset management (ITAM).

Manual activities harm organizations

The SysAid State of Service Management survey asked a focused question on how organizations currently track and manage their IT assets. As shown in the pie chart below, nearly one-third of organizations (30%) still track their IT assets manually, and, even worse, 12% have no formal IT asset management capabilities.

How do you currently manage your assets?

ITAM and ITSM capabilities go hand-in-hand (and ITAM was included as a service management process in ITIL 4). However, the former might suffer from a lack of enabling technology investment, unlike ITSM. After all, it has been decades since 42% of organizations didn’t have an ITSM solution, IT service desk tool, ticketing software, or similar! IT organizations know the benefits of investing in the automation of ITSM best practices. However, as our survey results show, the same isn’t yet true for ITAM.

It’s a surprising statistic, yet unsurprising. Corporate ITAM activities have often struggled to gain the investment they need, even though the potential financial and risk management benefits can be significant. When asset tracking is manual, it’s easy for IT organizations to lose track of assets. And without real-time asset tracking, these organizations are “flying blind” in terms of exposure to security vulnerabilities, compliance issues, and unnecessary financial losses. Plus, of course, manual operations are slower than their automated equivalents, and we humans are prone to errors, too.

Automated ITAM capabilities are increasingly integrated into ITSM solutions, with AI and automation employed to better manage your organization’s IT assets. If you haven’t seen “the art of the ITAM possible” available in modern ITAM and ITSM solutions, we’d love to show you.

In our next post, we’ll dive deeper into the biggest challenges and missed opportunities revealed in the 2025 State of Service Management report, including why real-time IT asset management could make or break IT resilience in the AI era. Stay tuned!