Eric Johnson, CIO, PagerDuty, says CIOs have a unique opportunity to both lead the genAI conversation and implement strategic initiatives to improve customer experience – referencing his own company’s example.
During the last five to seven years, the CIO role has become more of a customer-facing function. The days of being back-office focused, where IT was just a cost center, are gone. So, too, are the days of digital transformation – which suddenly feels too small and limiting for what lies ahead.
Generative AI (genAI) has been the difference. The past year’s innovations have exploded genAI’s capabilities, going beyond conventional Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and accelerating what’s possible, taking on the detailed and complex processes that have challenged the industry.
CIOs now have a unique opportunity to both lead the genAI conversation and implement strategic initiatives to improve customer experience.
Analyzing PagerDuty platform data from nearly 20,000 accounts, one million users and tens of millions of incidents, we found that customer-facing incidents are increasing by 12.5% year over year.
According to IDC, more than 53% of organizations say an hour of downtime on a revenue-generating service costs a minimum of $100,000.00.
Compare that with PagerDuty’s own survey of more than 500 IT leaders, which estimates the true cost of downtime to be $4,537 per minute. Assuming that the average resolution time takes 175 minutes – that means each customer-impacting digital incident can cost nearly $800,000.
All told, the result is a mess of ballooning costs, revenue losses and wasted resources – never mind the untold damage these incidents inflict on customer relationships.
To solve numbers like these, CIOs are already taking a hard look at how to leverage all the cutting-edge technology and tools showing up in the market.
In another survey conducted by PagerDuty, 71% of respondents said their company is expanding investments in AI and machine learning in 2024, and that number is only growing. Additionally, the business decision-makers in our survey ranked “improving customer experience” one of their top three strategic priorities.
Nevertheless, many organizations still struggle to identify and respond to service disruptions before they impact customers, reputation and revenue. Organizations may not realize where that puts them in relation to their competitors or how to fix it. Enter genAI to take customer service a giant leap forward.
The influx of data – and increasing noise and frequency of incidents – is a firehose that humans simply can’t keep up with. Responding to every problem leaves room for error and the time spent resolving each one has a high cost. With automation as the first line of defense, machines can enrich and normalize data, run diagnostics, remediate issues and coordinate responses before responders become aware of them.
Adding genAI capabilities turbocharges these defenses. GenAI can take a first pass at drafting communications, postmortems, automation runbooks and more, helping teams use their capacity for more value-added work. The ability to query data offers them a richer and more detailed understanding of what’s happening in a fraction of the time so they can get to resolution faster. They can also incorporate learnings into future response strategies, including standardizing incident management, streamlining operations and automating key workflows to scale smoothly and reduce cognitive load.
This preserves human capacity and makes systems more resilient, giving teams the tools they need to make decisions and communicate quickly and decisively, thus minimizing customer disruption, reputational risk and revenue loss from operational failures.
At PagerDuty we developed several key features we think bring this promise to life.
Together, they’re called PagerDuty Advance – genAI capabilities we’ve embedded across the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. Designed to help organizations accelerate digital transformation initiatives while empowering responders to work faster and smarter, PagerDuty Advance includes:
- PagerDuty Advance Assistant for Slack and Microsoft Teams: A chatbot designed to lighten responders’ cognitive load by providing incident context and recommendations for next steps, directly from Slack and Microsoft Teams.
- PagerDuty Advance for Status Updates: Enables teams to generate an audience-specific status update draft in seconds, shortening communication cycles so they can focus on faster resolution.
- PagerDuty Advance for Automation Digest: This feature generates a draft summary of the most important results from running Automation Action jobs in one place, empowering responders to make more informed decisions.
- AI Generated Runbooks: Accelerates automation development and deployment by generating suggested runbook automations via manually engineered prompts or using pre-engineered prompts as a starting point.
- PagerDuty Advance for Postmortems: Automatically collects and collates incident data (logs, metrics, Slack conversations) to suggest how it happened, in what order, why, and what could prevent it in the future.
More than two years ago, we talked about recognizing customers as a key signal of the health of your digital assets. Since then, we’ve broken down many silos and seen customer service become the hero of resilient operations. However, ever-escalating complexity has made it hard for organizations to see how far they’ve come.
While we can’t predict everything that could go wrong, we know that eventually something will. Organizations must reduce the frequency and severity of major incidents to improve business continuity and digital operations resiliency.
When every minute of downtime equals business cost, providing a more reliable customer experience is mission-critical. Leveraging generative AI to assist teams in triaging, communicating, and reporting problems faster will make lighter work of your toughest, most complex customer service challenges.
