11 ways Agentic AI can help IT departments cut costs

When quarterly and annual reviews come around, many IT departments are left scrambling trying to balance their budget. It can be challenging to show your department’s value when your achievements are offset by outdated technology, slow and labor-intensive processes, and expensive equipment. This year, it’s time to make demonstrating the value of your crucial IT work a breeze. Here’s how—cutting costs while boosting efficiency and customer satisfaction. 

You’re probably wondering how on Earth it’s possible to achieve better results by spending less. The answer? Agentic AI. The latest iteration of AI technology, Agentic AI, refers to artificial intelligence that can operate and make decisions autonomously. Agentic AI tools can learn, adapt, and act in pursuit of goals based on real-time context and data. 

These Agentic AI programs build on the capabilities of conversational AI and generative AI, helping IT teams streamline processes, automate data collection and analysis, proactively resolve issues, improve communication, and more. Today, let’s take a closer look at 11 ways that Agentic AI can help IT departments cut costs without compromising on quality. 

#1: Automate routine IT tasks

One of the biggest hurdles when it comes to bringing your IT department into the modern age is getting rid of outdated processes and time-consuming manual tasks. Many mundane IT tasks suck up tons of time and don’t really require the resources of your creative and capable IT personnel. Instead, you can automate routine IT tasks using Agentic AI tools and free up your human team members to focus on more critical and/or complex tasks. 

Embracing Agentic AI for IT automation is part of the digital transformation, which McKinsey defines as “the rewiring of an organization, with the goal of creating value by continuously deploying tech at scale.” When you effectively transform your IT department with Agentic AI, you’ll be able to improve your customer experience and lower unit costs. 

#2: Reduce support ticket volume with AI-powered self-service

Increased ticket volume is overwhelming IT departments across the globe. As more and more end users adopt technology in their everyday workflows, IT teams are getting slammed with support tickets and help desk requests. These requests are often simple, but they take up time and resources that could be better used elsewhere.

With platforms like Atera’s AI Copilot, teams can empower end users to self-resolve their tickets. There is evidence that users want to be able to solve their IT issues themselves (with the help of an Agentic AI bot, in this case), and these platforms set them up to do so. 

This lowers support demands and frees up IT technicians to focus on more complex tasks. For example, consider a real-life success story from our clients at Leeds United Football Club. This organization was getting battered by endless IT support tickets – but after implementing Atera’s Agentic AI solutions, they were able to reduce ticket volume by 35%! 

#3: Accelerate ticket resolution (lower MTTR)

With AI solutions for IT help desk and ticketing, you’ll also see faster resolution times, or MTTR (mean time to resolution). Agentic AI tools can lead to faster diagnosis and triage of tickets. Oftentimes, issues can be resolved independently by Agentic AI, without the need for human intervention. If technician action is needed, Agentic AI can elevate the ticket to the appropriate technician. This, in turn, leads to shorter resolution times, which boosts customer satisfaction. 

KPMG reports that 90% of consumers worldwide consider issue resolution as their most crucial customer service concern. Customers are also likely to consider poor issue resolution as a reason to switch providers and/or terminate contracts. In other words, bettering your customer satisfaction scores can save you from the costs of closed contracts and lost business. For employee users, you can also help boost retention. 

Image via Atera

#4: Enable predictive maintenance and downtime prevention

Agentic AI has incredible capabilities when it comes to cybersecurity. Agentic AI-enabled IT management platforms can detect anomalies, anticipating and thus preventing failures. 

This also helps to minimize unplanned outages, which can lead to violating the terms of an SLA (service level agreement). In order to maintain SLA compliance and avoid fines or penalties associated with noncompliance, implementing predictive Agentic AI maintenance strategies is paramount.  

#5: Optimize resource allocation and workload balancing

Agentic AI tools can help with smarter task distribution and allow you to avoid over- or understaffing in your IT department. These tools have advanced data analytics capabilities that can help you understand resource allocation, both in terms of personnel resources and software programs as well as hardware and machinery. With predictive analytics and projections, Agentic AI platforms can also help you make more informed budgetary decisions for the future. 

#6: Reduce escalation costs with intelligent prioritization

Failing to effectively prioritize tickets can lead to unnecessary costs that turn your IT budget update down. With Agentic AI, many tickets can be resolved without human intervention – but that’s not to say that AI will be taking over jobs. 

Instead, Agentic AI is a complement and supplement to a human team. An AI ticketing solution can help you save on specialist labor by elevating fewer tickets to senior staff who are focused on other crucial tasks. In doing so, Agentic AI can help to keep your cost per ticket low. 

#7: Automate patch management and routine updates

Dealing with patch management in a busy IT environment is always a challenge. With automated patch management solutions like Atera, however, you can create customized schedules for each endpoint, achieve cybersecurity best practices, and gain better visibility and control over your entire IT environment. 

You’ll be able to streamline maintenance, reduce overtime hours that you pay out, and decrease manual interventions. Instead, Agentic AI can handle both scheduled and unscheduled patching for you. Now that’s what we call next-generation IT. 

#8: Enhance security and prevent costly breaches

In today’s day and age, cybersecurity is paramount. Agentic AI tools offer proactive threat detection. These tools learn (and remember) what is normal in your IT environment – and if something is off, they will triage the situation and raise the alarm if needed. 

Agentic AI can even handle some security issues all on its own. After all, downtime and breaches come with serious costs. According to Forbes, the average cost of downtime has increased to $9,000 per minute for larger organizations and can be as high as $5 million per hour for high-risk industries (think healthcare or finance). And that’s before any fines or penalties that may be assessed! 

The true risk of downtime and security breaches comes in the form of loss of customer trust and reputation. But Agentic AI is here to help. These tools can help you reduce the risk of downtime and security crises by proactively scanning for anomalies, acting independently to reduce harm, and in many cases, mitigating issues without the need for human intervention at all. 

Image via Queue-it

#9: Optimize cloud and infrastructure usage

Agentic AI tools can help optimize cloud and infrastructure usage, reducing the underutilization of resources and waste. Many cloud technologies offer scalability, redundancy, and high availability features, which are designed to minimize downtime and thus improve operational resilience. Agentic AI helps to ensure infrastructure is being maximally taken advantage of and supports your team in determining how you can better utilize your resources. 

#10: Reduce training and onboarding costs

With Agentic AI, you can shorten the ramp-up time and associated costs of onboarding for new staff. AI-assisted knowledge transfer can help with the onboarding process. How? One way is through the creation of knowledge base articles. Agentic AI tools, like Atera’s Autonomous IT, add their learnings and discoveries to a shared knowledge base so that everyone can learn together.

Having an Agentic AI assistant in onboarding support can also help new hires get familiar with company processes much more seamlessly and without the need for another staff member to be constantly by their side. 

#11: Improve vendor and procurement efficiency

One of Agentic AI’s greatest feats from a business perspective is its predictive analytics and resource and inventory allocation analysis. With more data about how your software, hardware, and services are being used, you can determine the best vendors and procurement methods to suit your needs. You’ll end up avoiding unnecessary purchases and allocating resources to ensure maximum usage, cutting down on waste, and other budgetary frustrations. 

Balance your IT budget with Agentic AI today

Agentic AI tools come with a host of cost-saving benefits for IT departments across the globe. From automating routine IT tasks and reducing support ticket volume to enhancing security and reducing the financial burden of training a new hire, you can trim down spending in virtually every area of your operations. 

Want to see the impact of Agentic AI for yourself? Try out Atera’s Agentic AI-powered IT management today, including our AI Copilot at no cost to you, with a 30-day free trial and no credit card down. You’ll wonder why you haven’t started using Atera earlier.