The Agentic Shift: The Future of Autonomous IT Operations

Hey guys, thanks for the throw. We're here with Phil Christensen's, chief Product Officer for Zurich, and we're having a chat about, well, how AI is actually being applied within IT operations. Phil, welcome the show.

Thank you, Mike. Happy to be here. So we see a massive amount of hype around AI these days, and it's supposed to do everything from, I don't know, curing cancer to sending us to the moon and back.

But, um, it does seem like there are some basic fundamental things and IT operations where it's making a difference. And so are you starting to see that and do IT folks, or do they have faith in AI these days? Because I think initially there was a lot of skepticism.

Yeah. Well, thanks, thanks for the opportunity to chat. I look forward to talking about ai.

Certainly a topic of of interest at the moment. Um, if you wouldn't mind, just to give a little background on, just so there's some context for the types of the answers that I give on, on who I and what we do, and I, I won't, not gonna go into a marketing bit, just just for some background. It SM platform, so service management as well as an incident management platform.

So we allow for our customers to basically run a service desk. So the traditional kind of broken laptop, someone calls in with a problem, uh, as well as the broader IT operations issue of a machine breaks. So a router goes down, a server crashes, and these things break in the middle of the night on a Sunday, and they aren't gonna call a help desk, they're gonna send in an alert through an observability tool.

We integrate with those tools and we bring that data into our incident management system and we help our customers to, um, establish war rooms, contact the right people, um, establish escalation trees as well as run playbooks and, and actually execute remediation steps to resolve the problems that are occurring. And then retrospect on, on what's occurred. And, you know, everything I just described are, these are workflows that organizations have been doing for a long time.

Neither of these concepts are, are new by any means, but what we've seen from an AI standpoint inside this space is really an ability to bring better tooling, more efficiency, help all our customers do more faster, uh, with less. And, you know, if you dial back when this all started, I guess in 2024 ish, somewhere in there when LLMs really took off, you know, we started with a lot of sort of your standard LLM based tools, things like summarization capabilities, uh, reading from a, uh, uh, historical tickets to figure out how to route something, sentiment and tone analysis, you know, Grammarly style, uh, improvements. And all of these things were help people to be better.

And I think they helped you to do your job faster. I think as, as 2025 sort of on, uh, took off, you started to see more, we started building things like chat bots and, and actually constructing multi-step interactions where not only do you summarize something, you also, you know, look for a specific answer. You maybe first you look for a knowledge base and then you look for a similar request from the past, and then you create a ticket, you start to piece together multiple steps.

And, and now I think we're seeing 2026 is this year of AG agentic. And, and ag agentic really gives this idea of not only bringing tools to, uh, our customers, but actually taking action. AG agentic is like that, that grand leap into, uh, not just, uh, tooling, but remediation and actually going out and having an AI agent go do something, add scale to a server, restart a a, a, uh, a router, like truly taking action.

And I think that's where things start to get a little bit more radical, but, uh, that seems to be coming. And are people crafting these workflows around AI agents or are they still experimenting with them? Or how far down the path are we?

Well, I think that the idea of a workflow in a, in a, in a, in a automation tool like ours is not new. Like we, for, for many years, ITSM tools and, and incident management tools have had workflow capabilities where you say, you know, when this type of event occurs, execute these four steps. And those steps could be web hooks out to third party systems.

They could be, you know, waiting for approval from a manager to take, to execute a task that's not new. I think what's new is that you now have, um, these AI agents who can more intelligently figure out when to do these things, and you can actually determine based upon what's occurring in a customer's environment, which one of these tasks should be executed. So I think executing workflows, constructing workflows is not necessarily new.

I think it's more about helping our customers to understand when to execute those workflows and, and, um, maybe doing them faster. Also, it seems to me though that the creation of the workflows are becoming more accessible because I do have a natural language interface, and I think historically I had, I have a lot of expertise to create that automation and maybe I don't need as much of that anymore. Yeah, no, I think there's some truth in that to for sure.

It's, it's getting easier to build these types of automations, but I still think that you still, you still see, um, especially in this world of, of infrastructure and IT and IT operations, you still see many companies, I'll give you ours as an example. Um, the founder of our company is still still a member of our engineering team and, and a very important member of the engineering team. And when I joined two years ago, he'd been, he'd been founded the company eight, eight years prior to that.

He was still operating as the SRE, basically, he was still the guy with the case of the kingdom to AM to our Amazon account. And the one who had control over who could get it, like be, it's such a critical part of who we are. And with that information, so much can be done.

You could, you could take down our system right, with that information that, that he has. And I think that the, I the last thing he gave up as he sort of became a, a founder moved into a more of a strategic role as he moved outta this operational role. The last thing he gave up was those keys to the kingdom.

And I think that's very common at, at small companies that the, this, this thing that you're seeing get automated in IT operation space or at least claim to be automated, is sometimes the most critical part of your entire company. So I still think there's not skepticism, but a, a desire to make sure that's done safely. Um, many, many companies, I'll give you one last example.

I was talking to a, a customer who was evaluating our software and we were talking about the idea of these virtual SREs or virtual IT operations members. And this guy was like, why would I, uh, hand that over to an AI agent? Those are the most critical jobs in my company.

They're the most high pay, high paying jobs in my company, and they're the hardest to recruit for because they're so important. That's the last thing I'm gonna hand to an AI agent. So, I don't know, I think there's, in this space of IT operations, we've chosen some of the most critical functions to, uh, theoretically hand over to ai.

I think it's gonna take some time, uh, before companies start doing that, Are people rethinking what their ITSM platform's gonna be? Because a lot of them are looking at their existing platforms they've had for many years, and they can see that there are AI capabilities being added to them. So what kind of creates that moment in time where somebody wakes up one morning and says, Hey, we need to just rethink this from the platform all the way down to the, the Yeah.

The studs as it were. I mean, I, I don't know that that's changed much. I, I mean, as it relates to ai, I think that people are constantly evaluating their SaaS products, uh, in, in, in any enterprise.

And you wake up one day after using the tool for, uh, three or four years and you realize that you're paying a lot of money for it, you're using 20% of it, and you got a bunch of data that you didn't spend enough time making sure was well organized and it's a mess. And, you know, suddenly like, well, I could clean all this up, or I could just go find a better tool. And, uh, that's where we come in and we, we do a lot of replacements in that, in that area.

But I, I think that's a, that's not uncommon. I think that, I mean, that's not being driven by ai. I think that's just the nature of enterprise software.

Yeah. And, and a lot of the reasons that there's, there's so much turnover. You know, ITSM is a billion dollar turnover market every year.

Um, because of that, You hear a lot these days about how people are going to deploy their own AI agents, build their own workflows, and there's a lot of noise on Wall Street about the impact that all this will have on SaaS applications. But I mean, what's realistic here and what do I wanna do versus even if I can do it doesn't mean I should do it. Yeah.

I, I think at the end of the day, if you think about platform vendors in particular, um, I think they like ourselves. I think this is the area where to some extent, you, you're still, you're going to need platforms. If you think about in our, in our space, there's over a million requests logged across our customers, a million and a half requests logged across all of our customers every month.

That data from those requests is not in any LLM is not accessible by Claude or anybody else. It's in, it's behind our, our walls. And if we, if, if we, the only people that can access it are us.

And I think that's not uncommon for ERP systems, CRM systems, there is a core data element that platforms have that you're, you're, you're, you're not gonna be able to, um, sort of vibe code your way into. Um, frankly, I, so I think that, you know, you look at this world of, of vibe coding and, and Claude Code and like, it, it very much focuses on sort of that top layer, the UI layer, um, there, there, when, when you start dealing with larger enterprise applications, you're dealing with a lot more than that. Um, and I think we're actually well positioned as a SaaS company to take advantage of these tools and, and to use this amazing knowledge base we have of how our customers have been using our ITSM for the last decade to bring better and better tools, um, to our customers.

How smart will these platforms get? And I'm asking the question because at some point, will I, as the IT manager just kind of rolling the work in the morning and there'll be a message saying, here are the three most important things you should fix because, you know, these are the ones that are most likely to get me fired. Or, you know, yeah.

Is it gonna, We do that today? We've done that, we've done that a lot. Before's.

That's why people buy our software. Uh, no, that's, you know, I, I don't think that's, I, I, I think bringing the right problems to the right people is what our tools have been doing from the beginning. And, um, we want to be able to do that better.

We wanna be able to give our, our customers tools to, um, remediate those issues when they do occur. But I don't think it changes this fundamental need to have orchestrating tools and, and, and systems of record. Um, you know, I, you think about if you've ever been through like an ISO certification or, uh, any of these compliance certs that companies get, if you think about the rigor that goes into those, uh, this is why companies use enterprise softwares because there's actually rules that govern how you need to operate as a company.

And, and, and that requires having systems of records and, and process and audit is boring as those things sometimes sound. That that is what keeps your data safe. And when you sign up for, uh, you know, when you, when you buy something, when you go to the hos, the doctor's office, like these things are not just done because people, you know, for fun, they're, they're done for, for real reasons.

And I think that, uh, that doesn't change just because there's ready access to, um, to, you know, workflow capabilities in vibe coding. There is some expectation out there, at least in some quarters, that eventually these AI agents will reduce the number of IT people that we need. Do you subscribe to that theory, or is it gonna be more about, well, maybe we'll just get more value outta the folks We do have, in fact, maybe we will see more organizations hiring professional IT folks because well, they'll be more of them available, but we still need 'em.

Yeah, I, I, I mean, I think it's, it's the latter. Every job I've ever had personally, the first thing I do when I get into seed is start to look for things I can automate and look for things I can do faster and more efficiently. I think any strong professional it, uh, person does that.

And you know, the idea that there are teams of junior IT guys and gals that are just doing mundane password resets all day, like, I just don't think that exists today. Anyway, uh, I, I I think that these things have all largely been automated and you already are in a situation where you are constantly pushing your employees to, to do more and think about things differently and come up with more efficient ways to do their own jobs like that. That's how you rise up through corporations and through, uh, the professional world.

And, uh, if you're good at that, you're gonna be even better at it with, uh, the types of tools that that AI will bring. It seems to me too that maybe our expectations for AI are a little, uh, off the charts, shall we say, and won't it just kind of become the new table stakes and everybody's gonna have the same basic set of capabilities. So, um, you know, what is the ROI per se when, you know, it's not really gonna be necessarily a competitive advantage as much as it is just something everybody does.

Yeah, I mean, majoring ROI is has always been the name of the game in enterprise software for any feature we've ever built. And that's how, that's, that's how I, as a product manager my whole career, that's how I've always thought about everything from, from a, from AI or before I think about how many of our, my customers are gonna use this, what's the impact that's gonna have at, at, at their operation? And, um, and is it something we should build?

And I don't think that, um, fundamentally changes. I think there's just better tools available that can have a larger outsize impact as, as we deliver them. And, you know, the, it's, we will certainly see a change in how those tools are created.

I think we'll be able to make more tools faster. We're already seeing our engineers are all using cloud code now, um, as you know, what do they say? Like 10% of all public code written is coming through cloud code now or some insane number like that.

Uh, it, it, we're going to be able to produce more code more rapidly, but all of that code is going to remain aimed at, uh, I improving the return on value for our customers as they use our software. You know, we're, we're embracing that. We're embracing the idea that, um, hey, maybe, uh, a year ago you needed a hundred people to do this job, and now you, you need 80.

That's great. We love that here at Zern, and we'll figure out a way to, to, to be okay if, even if that means a reduction in the amount of licenses you need to buy from us, we, we'd rather we brought efficiency gains to our customers. All right.

But those other 20 might go work for organizations that previously would never have had an ITSM platform or something of your ilk because they couldn't afford, or were just basically trying to get by with some, you know, non platform oriented tools, right? Yeah, yeah, I suppose so. But you know, I think that they'll take with them the knowledge of the, the, the tooling that they learned, uh, at their previous job.

And so, you know, we have a very vibrant word of mouth, uh, uh, uh, network of, of, uh, of users in, in, in the zu in, in the current world. So, So what do you see in people do in terms of the way they manage it today that just makes you shake your head a little bit and go, folks, maybe we should be a little bit smarter than that. Interesting.

Um, you know, I, I do think that, um, there's an interesting divide between IT and DevOps. I, I've sort of lived between both my career as, as sort of a, a creator of software and then also a, a member of IT departments. And, you know, the, the DevOps world is one in which they embrace a little bit more of a, uh, people over process type of mentality where they empower people to define, uh, uh, how they want to operate.

IT by its nature is a little more rigid, you know, it's a little more here, you know, you look at the ITIL standards, it's these 32 different ways of doing things and you do them this way and statuses flow this way. And I think there's a, there's some amount of rigidity in, in some IT organizations that could be, uh, loosened up a little. I think I, I think there's, there, the, the strict, strict adherence to, uh, process is important.

It, it allows you to scale an operation, uh, which you ultimately is a good thing. But I think it can drive people, it can, it can make jobs feel more mundane. It can remove some creativity from, um, everyday life.

And I think that that is something you don't want to do. You know, an example, we, we released an AI feature in which we, we des, we, um, attempt to assess the sentiment of a conversation. So you're, you're in, you have a ticket open, the ticket has gone back and forth.

You got someone really frustrated, they're not getting the service they expect and they're angry. We'll put a little frowny face and we'll give a little description of, of, you know, or maybe even like, you know, steam coming outta the ears. And we used emojis to do this in our application.

And, and you know, there was, it was an incredibly polarizing feature. Uh, we had a lot of IT professionals that were like, how dare you put an emoji in my ITSM? That is not the place for them.

You know, this is not an IT process. Get it out. And others that were like, okay, maybe my tone is a little bit, uh, too techno speak in nature, and I could lighten up a little when I, when I have these conversations.

So I dunno, I think a little bit of lightning in, in it, a little bit more of a people of a process is not a, not a bad thing. Hey, do you think therefore that maybe AI will be the vehicle where maybe we do introduce a little more empathy across these workflows? 'cause Well, that's a big phrase in the land of DevOps, but to your point about idle, you know, it's all about thou shout.

So there's a middle ground here. Yeah, yeah. Maybe.

You know, I think that, um, there's certainly the, the pace and speed of innovation that AI is enabling is going to allow ITSM companies to just do a lot more, a lot faster in the coming months, frankly. And I think being open-minded to change and open-minded to doing things differently, uh, is, is important. And I, there seems, there does seem to be a moment here with the what's happening and what's available that, uh, you know, if you've, some of these thought pieces that have come out that perhaps have even moved the market related to, you know, the, the future of something big is happening.

And some of these big articles that are out there, they talk about, you know, you know, put your ego aside no matter how senior you are, you are, and, and make sure you take a look at these things. And I, I think that, that, that seems to be happening. All right, folks.

Who knows? Maybe those lions and lambs will be lying down together. After all, thanks for being on the show.

Absolutely. Thank you, Mike. Appreciate your time.

All right. Back to you guys in.