In tech circles these days, one topic drives every conversation: artificial intelligence (AI). Whether discussing the potential benefits of increased productivity or the potential risks, the role of AI in business is on the minds of everyone, from C-suite leaders to recent college graduate hires. AI is a hot topic because while people can see its promise, companies have struggled to find practical uses for it.

One area where AI has delivered clear benefits is improving the digital employee experience (DEX), which has become an increasingly important factor in company performance. My company’s Global Digital Employee Experience (DEX) Survey found that 68% of those in both the Generation Z and millennial generations – who make up an increasingly large portion of the workforce – are likely to move on to other companies if their employer’s DEX is not up to par. A poor DEX degrades not only productivity and performance but can also hurt a company’s ability to hire and retain employees. 

Delivering flawless digital experiences is hard. The flow of data in distributed cloud environments coupled with an exploding number of endpoints has exceeded the capacity of manual processing. Collecting huge volumes of data from containers, microservices, and other highly dynamic environments is one thing, but analyzing that data and using it to drive improvements in operational efficiency and employee happiness are substantial challenges. The complexity of this challenge and how well companies resolve it affects the quality of DEX. 

The Broad Reach of AI’s Benefits

Implementing AI strategies can help companies build a more proactive approach to handling traffic, remediating network problems, and accelerating the decision-making process. And when fine-tuned, AI can automatically take action to address issues before end users are aware of them, improving both DEX and performance. 

An integrated AI platform can address many of the problems that hinder performance, from data collection to the user experience. A platform using AI and ML can support all primary IT functions through the scalable ingestion and analysis of the ever-increasing volume, variety, and velocity of data generated within the ecosystem. Predictive analytics and machine learning (ML) algorithms can also anticipate employees’ needs, proactively addressing potential issues before they escalate. The platform can then correlate data to provide actionable insights in a meaningful way to support decision-making. ML uses algorithms to predict outcomes based on input data, automatically updating those predicted outcomes as new data arrives. 

Improving the User Experience 

For users, an AI platform can deliver personalized user interfaces and intelligent virtual assistants that can tailor digital experiences to the preferences and requirements of individual workers. AI can perform workflow analysis, incident response, and incident detection for emerging issues, and it can also correlate human feedback with performance data for contextual insights about the employee experience. The ability of AI to flag anomalies and pinpoint the root cause of an issue helps IT leaders address individual problems before they become system wide, which speeds mean time to repair (MTTR) for whatever issues are uncovered. 

These use cases deliver improved operations and eliminate roadblocks to productivity. Removing these roadblocks makes employees more efficient at their jobs while also reducing a lot of the frustration and workarounds that employees have to rig up when technology doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.

The effective use of AI to automate repetitive tasks is critical for companies looking to improve their performance and remain competitive. The shortage of IT talent affects virtually every industry and shows no signs of abating. An improved DEX keeps current employees happy while being an asset in attracting new talent. 

Companies are also facing a long-predicted brain drain as baby boomers retire, taking a lot of institutional knowledge and IT know-how with them. To compensate for that loss, companies can use AI to create runbooks based on the experience and insight of those boomers, thus automating most routine and manual processes.

DEX and Performance Go Hand in Hand

Amid the growth and increased complexity of today’s distributed enterprises, the use of high-fidelity end-user experience data, like the type gathered by observability platforms, is crucial for strategic AI initiatives. However, the importance of rich, AI-ready telemetry that can specifically be used to optimize DEX solutions is often overlooked. But it shouldn’t be, because system performance and user experiences are tightly connected.

As IT applications have become more complex, the ways that operations can break down have also increased. Today, the complexity and speed of IT operations have overpowered human beings’ ability to keep abreast of everything in their environment. AI, supported by observability tools that turn raw data collection into actionable intelligence, is one of the few ways IT leaders can address the growing shortage of skilled IT workers and prevent operations from breaking down.

Without the comprehensive data collection and analysis AI can provide, a flood of service tickets and phone calls about stalled network operations or downtime might lead to resignation letters from employees dissatisfied with their digital experiences. AI may have its risks in some areas, but it will be a critical tool in a company’s IT toolbox for improving network operations and DEX.