There’s no question in my mind that 2023 is going to be remembered as the year that AI started to change our life in some way. Our kids are already using it to cheat at school.. and the slow moving education system doesn’t yet have an answer for it. Everyone I’ve spoken to in business has used it in some way to help with daily tasks. For many chat GPT is a constantly open tab. Even Elon Musk and others are suggesting we hold off for 6 months before developing it any further until society and the law catches up with the ramifications of it. (I can’t see that happening just quietly).

How will this impact your role working in IT in either management or technical roles?

Firstly, I see this as a continuation of the existing automation trend we’ve been seeing for a while. Public cloud and increased computing power, gave rise to big data which gave rise to big data sets, which have fed into AI models. Concurrently automation available through public cloud services have put power into the hands of semi-technical users and created customisable solutions that have improved day to day productivity for users.

In IT departments we’ve seen automation in self-healing networks. passwordless and self service password reset systems and common tech support issues fixed through scripted responses to automated alerts.

So where’s it all going?

• Further automation of low-end tasks, reducing the headcount required for support people. Think AI powered knowledge base articles, and then AI powered scripts automatically fixing identified issues and reporting back.
• An increasing emphasis on user productivity – the IT department will move away from just keeping the lights on, to going deep with users to understand what quick wins can be made by utilizing tools like Power Automate, Power Apps and AI.
• IT Managers will be assessed on their ability to increase productivity across the company through smart use of modern technology, rather than by just uptime or pure cost focused KPI’s. Educating the business on innovations that can be implemented quickly will be the requirement, as this will be needed just to keep up with competition.

As an example, I thought of a use for AI recently that should be implemented. Automatic generation of meeting minutes based on Teams or Zoom meetings. So I did a google search, and sure enough, there’s already plenty of options out there for AI powered meeting bots that take notes, summarise and create the minutes for any given online meeting. You can even send your bot along to the meeting instead of you and it’ll send you back a summary of the meeting with all the key action points you need to know about. Go figure, you can even outsource your presence at meetings now, how cool is that!

And just for the record, I wrote every word of this myself.

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