How agentic AI will change IT support roles

Your weekly round-up of the questions asked by readers of CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World sees us learn how agentic AI will change IT support jobs; why passkeys are not more widely adopted; and when agentic AI will take over the world.

Support for IT support

Agentic AI is revolutionizing the approach by a range of organizations to IT support. Many IT leaders agree with this week’s CIO columnist that the future is agentic AI that solves problems before they are even reported. He argued that it’s time for CIOs to stop paying the innovation tax of legacy IT tickets and laid out an IT roadmap for agentic AI. 

This caused readers of CIO.com to ponder the implications for their own working lives, asking Smart Answers to explain how agentic AI is going to impact the role of humans in IT support. 

Fueled by years of human reporting, our AI chatbot states that while the role of IT pros will change, they will adapt and survive. The shift will be from manual, repetitive tasks to more strategic and personal interactions. AI will automate high-volume, low-value service desk activities, including incident resolution and data validation, freeing up IT staff for higher-value work such as analysis and customer satisfaction efforts. 

The benefits of passkeys are apparent, which may explain why our readers were keen to ask why they aren’t always adopted. While passkeys offer a more secure and user-friendly alternative to traditional passwords, their widespread adoption faces several significant challenges. These include technical complexities, implementation costs, device compatibility issues, and a lack of clear communication from major technology providers, which collectively hinder their full integration into enterprise and consumer environments. 

Find out: What challenges hinder widespread adoption of passkeys? 

When agents take over

Interest in autonomous agents is skyrocketing. This week, CIO.com revealed three industries where agentic AI is poised to make its mark. We heard CIOs from finance, retail, and healthcare discuss how they see the technology impacting their organizations and sectors overall. 

Smart Answers is an AI-based chatbot tool designed to help you discover content, answer questions, and go deep on the topics that matter to you. Each week we send you the three most popular questions asked by our readers, and the answers Smart Answers provides. 

Developed in partnership with Miso.ai, Smart Answers draws only on editorial content from our network of trusted media brands—CIO, Computerworld, CSO, InfoWorld, and Network World—and was trained on questions that a savvy enterprise IT audience would ask. The result is a fast, efficient way for you to get more value from our content.