AI agents can help organisations connect IT service management with business outcomes as customer expectations change, according to BMC Helix.

TECHx Media spoke with Haroon Ahmed, Vice President, Customer Success and Pre-sales at BMC Helix, during the BMC Helix Dubai roadshow.

In this interview, he discusses changing customer expectations, closer ties between IT service management and IT operations, and the wider business impact of incidents. He also covers personalisation and reliability, IT and business alignment, and the role of AI in service delivery.

TECHx Media: How are changing customer expectations influencing enterprise technology and digital transformation priorities?

People evaluate an organisation based on the outcome. They look at how well the system works, whether the experience is seamless, and whether the problem is solved before they notice. This is transforming priorities. Digital transformation used to be about digitalising processes and increasing the productivity of knowledge workers within applications. The current priority is rethinking how things get done. People want to communicate what they need, and the organisation should respond without requiring them to navigate the system structure first. To do that, a company needs connected data, a clear picture of the business service, and AI agents that can reason and act across systems.

TECHx Media: How can organizations improve service visibility and coordination by bringing IT service management and IT operations closer together?

Service management and operations have historically worked from different views of the same reality. Operations sees events, metrics and infrastructure health. Service management sees incidents, changes and user impact. People have sat on bridge calls to correlate signals, inspect dependencies and decide who should act. Bringing the two together requires a common understanding of business services, based on dependencies, ownership, and what the services mean for the business. With that understanding, AI agents can link incidents to the relevant tool or service, detect recent changes related to the incident, and enrich the incident with context. Coordination is no longer a manual process of handing control from one team to another, but a single workflow with a unified view of the whole.

TECHx Media: How can businesses move beyond resolving individual IT incidents to understand their wider impact on business operations and customer experience?

Resolving an incident answers technical questions: What is the root cause? What is the remediation? The business asks different questions: Which customers were affected? What commitments are at risk? What was the cost of the disruption?

Answering them requires connecting technical signals to business context. Every component should map to the business services it supports, and every service to the customers, processes and revenue that depend on it. AI makes this practical at scale. Agents can correlate thousands of events, identify the affected service, find similar past incidents, and estimate likely impact in minutes rather than hours. The critical decisions remain judgement calls. Do we roll back immediately or continue diagnosis? What risk are we willing to accept? AI brings the evidence together. People with domain judgement decide what matters. That is how incident response becomes business resilience.

TECHx Media: How can organizations balance personalization, service reliability and operational complexity to deliver consistent customer experiences?

These are commonly seen as forces working against one another. Every additional personalisation brings integrations, dependencies, and possible points of failure. The answer is to stop trying to manage complexity manually. Organisations need a solid foundation: an understanding of their business services and their health, rather than more people monitoring more dashboards. With AI agents in place, organisations can cope with the complexity. The agents understand what users are asking for, verify the health of the service, check whether the user is authorised to use it, and resolve the request, all while monitoring the services on which the experience is built. Humans concentrate on the decisions that shape the experience: which trade-offs are acceptable, where reliability matters most, and what good looks like for this customer. AI provides scale, and domain judgement provides direction.

TECHx Media: How can IT leaders align service management priorities with business objectives to improve employee and customer experience?

Alignment starts with changing what IT measures. Ticket volumes and resolution times describe activity. Business leaders care about service availability, employee productivity, customer impact, and risk. IT leaders should set priorities based on the services offered to the business rather than on technical components. They need to agree with business executives on what an acceptable result looks like for each service. They also need to question the process. Rather than asking how to handle tickets more efficiently, they should ask why the employee needs to create a ticket in the first place. This question shifts the focus from optimisation to transformation. People need to be mindful of where their added value lies. As processes become automated, they have more time to apply their judgement and redesign services.

TECHx Media: What role can AI and automation play in helping organizations improve service delivery, operational efficiency and customer satisfaction?

Every technology revolution (industrial, digital and AI) has taken on more of the execution while moving human value higher: from muscle to mind, to judgement, and now to imagination. AI continues that pattern in service delivery. Generative AI removes cognitive toil by summarising and recommending. Agentic AI goes further by acting across systems. The next step is the Digital FTE: AI with enough context, tools and autonomy to own a meaningful body of work. That includes observing service health, investigating issues, initiating approved fixes and updating stakeholders. We move from asking how much work one person can do to asking how much work one person can orchestrate. Customer satisfaction improves when issues are prevented rather than merely resolved, and people focus on the decisions that matter most.

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