Achieving your AI Strategy with Automation

AI must be the hottest topic in the business news at the moment whether its public offerings like ChatGPT or the plethora of business offerings starting to appear. In a recent Gartner survey¹ 92% of CIOs believe AI will be implemented in their organizations by 2025 but turning the promise of AI into reality is not easy, in the same survey 49% of leaders highly involved in AI report that their organizations struggle to estimate and demonstrate the technology’s value. In the last 12 months, Microsoft has launched a whole range of AI offers from 365 Co-pilot – a data mining solution for your business records; to solutions like Security Co-pilot and Azure Co-pilot – a solution to help you design, operate, optimize, and troubleshoot your cloud infrastructure and services.

What are the benefits these new Microsoft AI services?

What the Microsoft AI Offers are doing is trawling the vast amounts of available data from the cloud services and telling you about things the AI thinks you should be aware of based on a set of Microsoft’s provided knowledge. The AI is going to mine the huge amount of data out there and tell you about things you need to respond to i.e., Servers missing security patches, VMs running short of disk space, over spec-ed Azure resources. AI will proactively identify issues in your environment, based on the data gathered, that you would not find manually because you could not process the information, so that you can act on them before they become service-affecting.  

What are the impacts of these new Microsoft AI services?

The new AI services will be identifying issues and suggesting what you should do about these issues, but AIs are not going to be fixing anything. In a pure AI model, AI identifies but humans resolve. In effect, AI is going to generate even more manual tasks, because it will identify more things you need to resolve than you could ever find manually today. And we do not have enough time to resolve what we already know about.  

How do you achieve the benefits from Microsoft’s AI services?

There is no doubt that the AI services from Microsoft can offer huge benefits to organizations but only if you have the means to act on the things that AI identifies. Forbes in an article on “How AI and Automation are transforming the world”² breaks down AI into two categories automation and augmentation. by augmenting, we can use AI to enhance the intelligence and performance of human beings; by automating, we can eliminate the need for more human labor. Organizations can use AI to automatically detect issues to be resolved, then use Automation to execute the tasks to remediate and resolve the issues AI identified, however without implementing Automation first organizations’ AI initiatives will not succeed.  

Automated AI Use Cases

But what sort of use cases is AI going to be able to help you with; well….

• Along with its highly published capabilities around AI-assisted document and email production, one of Microsoft 365 Copilot’s use cases is to monitor and ensure the security of sensitive operational and customer data, safeguarding against potential breaches. It will identify those documents and data stores within the Microsoft 365 estate that do not have any security classifications or do not meet Microsoft recommended practices.The AI will trawl the data and identify documents that have no security classifications, but it will not set or resolve those classifications.This is where automation would be able to take this list of documents and then apply a set of security classifications, keeping a company’s data estate and attack surface secure with AI-driven troubleshooting and automated remediation.
• Analyzing for cybersecurity threats is a hugely complex task for humans and the volume of threats is increasing. Microsoft’s new Security Copilot surfaces prioritized threats in real time and anticipates a threat actor’s next move with continuous reasoning based on Microsoft’s global threat intelligence and more than 65 trillion daily signals. It will make a set of recommendations on what tasks the security professionals should perform to resolve issues. Again, this is where the Automation – AI bridge comes into play with a set of automated actions that can be triggered based on threats identified by the Security Copilot, so that threats can not only be identified but also actioned at machine speed.
• With all the disparate services available in Azure, knowing how to manage and troubleshoot each one is beyond any one individual and is often a stretch even for the whole IT department. The new Azure Copilot is going to use Microsoft’s knowledge and analysis of your deployments to assist in troubleshooting your Azure infrastructure orchestrating data across Azure services for insights. Like the other Copilots it will make a set of recommendations on what tasks the IT teams should perform to resolve issues.  The Automation – AI bridge will have a set of automated actions executed based on issues detected by the Azure Copilot, so that incidents can not only be identified but also actioned immediately.

Automation the first step in making AI benefits a reality

As you can see AI is going to mine this huge amount of data out there and tell you about things you need to respond too, organizations can then use Automation to execute the tasks to remediate and resolve the issues AI identified. With Microsoft’s AI capabilities all hosted in the Azure cloud the output is directly accessible from Azure Automation meaning the integration from AI into Automation will be straight forward. With the huge level of tasks AI is going generate AI is going to drive the need for automation even more. Companies with low automation adoption are going to struggle with AI as they will not have the capabilities to process the output AI is going to generate. It is clear that to succeed with AI an organization needs to start with Automation now and with  the pay as you grow benefits of Azure Automation companies upfront costs for automation are low and as they expand their automation and their costs will only grow as they start to take advantage of the benefits AI is giving them and win – win situation. Our services team have been assisting companies leverage the power of AI and Automation through Azure Automation, Power Automate and Logic Apps.  If you want to find out how to turbo boost your IT Operations and Service Desk and save your team hours then book a 30-minute complimentary, no obligation, consultation with a member of our team and find out how the pay as you grow model along with AI and Automation can benefit your business.  

Further Reading

Here are some relevant articles which you may find helpful: What is Azure Automation? Azure Automation Costs Explained Azure Automation Best Practices Guide   References ¹                      https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/cio-challenges?utm_campaign=RM_GB_2024_ITCIO_C_BB1_CIOREPORTQ42024_EB_A&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Eloqua ²                      https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinesscouncil/2023/07/10/how-ai-and-automation-are-transforming-the-world/