UC Today was on the ground at UCX Manchester last week, where three themes dominated the conversation: ITSM tool implementation, the rise of the AI-powered service desk, and the growing importance of multi-supplier IT governance.
Industry experts and real-life ITSM adopters provided insight on the long-term promise of AI, the uncomfortable truth about failed implementations, and the foundational argument for managing complexity rather than avoiding it. Here are the key takeaways.
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AI Is Coming for Your ITSM, and Your Data Isn’t Ready
Chevonne Hobbs, Senior Business Consultant at CGI and Group Chair at itSMF, opened with a frank diagnosis. Across both public and private sector clients, she is seeing the same foundational problems holding organizations back from building a truly effective AI-powered service desk: inconsistent incident data, fragmented knowledge management, inaccurate asset records, and poorly mapped service dependencies.
Building an AI-powered service desk requires clean, well-structured data above all else. Hobbs made this point clearly when she said:
“In order for AI to be able to predict when an incident may occur, for it to be able to do any self-healing…it needs to understand what assets you have and how they all link together.”
And without that foundation in place, even the most sophisticated AI-powered service desk capabilities will fail to deliver meaningful value.
Her framework for AI maturity in ITSM:
- Generative AI, already embedded in tools like ServiceNow, Freshservice, and BMC Helix, delivers immediate productivity gains: summarizing incidents, suggesting knowledge articles, and generating reports.
- CGI’s own internal survey found that 84% of users reported an improved ability to manage their workload through generative AI, and 90% reported improved well-being.
- The next tier, agentic AI, orchestrates workflows, triages tickets, and enforces governance across platforms.
- Above that sits AIOps: correlating events across the entire estate, self-healing before incidents are raised, and pushing the AI-powered service desk towards a genuine zero-touch operating model.
The path forward, she argued, runs through community. Building a cross-business AI strategy group, running weekly lunch-and-learns, and creating shared channels for teams to surface use cases are all part of how CGI has embedded AI across its organization.
The broader advice for IT leaders: envision the strategy, engage stakeholders early, test with real users, govern responsibly, and stay agile — because the technology is evolving faster than most organizations can follow.
Stop Blaming the Tool: The Hard Truth About ITSM Tool Implementation
The event’s most candid session tackled a question many IT leaders quietly already know the answer to: when an ITSM tool implementation fails, is it really the software’s fault?
Martina Holubcova, Assistant Director of Service Management at Manchester Metropolitan University, brought the perspective of someone fresh from a major implementation. The university recently deployed Freshservice as its new service management platform, spanning 85 teams and 900 agents across the organization.
She credited the project’s success to collaborating with different stakeholders, for example with the academic registrar as project sponsor, and user-grouips scoring vendor demos. She captured the guiding principle when she said:
“Sometimes the decision itself isn’t as important as the fact that you made it together.”
And that buy-in, she noted, is what separates an ITSM tool implementation that sticks from one that gets replaced again in three years.
Barclay Rae, an ITSM consultant, was unequivocal about the root cause of most implementation failures in his experience. He said:
“The biggest issue that I’ve seen, and it happens all the time… is underestimation. It’s underestimating the work that’s required. It’s underestimating the scope of the work that’s required. And underestimating particularly the people and culture side of things.”
And that underestimation, he argued, stems from a fundamental misclassification: ITSM tools are business applications, not technical IT systems, and any ITSM tool implementation should be governed accordingly, not treated as a purely technical project.
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The Relay Team Problem: Multi-Supplier IT Governance as a Strategic Priority
The third core takeaway from the event regarded how multi-supplier IT management is the quiet risk most organizations are not yet taking seriously enough.
Claire Agutter (Director) and Tony Williams (Associate SIAM Partner) of Scopism specialize in Service Integration and Management (SIAM). This refers to extending ITSM processes across organizational boundaries to manage multiple suppliers as a coherent whole. Their global survey found that 82% of organizations want better performance from existing providers, yet most are still not actively managing the interfaces between them. This is the core problem that multi-supplier IT governance is designed to solve.
Agutter framed the challenge with an analogy:
“Our suppliers are like these high performing athletes. But the challenge is, it’s like a relay team. So you get these high performing athletes, but they also need to integrate with each other. And so often what we see is it’s the handoff points, the escalations, the misaligned targets that the baton gets dropped from the relay team perspective.”
For leaders who view this as a costly and complex overhaul, Agutter walked through a practical, low-barrier entry point when she said:
“Find a service that’s not working at the moment. Find something that’s causing pain. Understand then who owns that service, because quite often that’s the very first question, who’s looking after this?”.
Williams identified the two failure points he sees most consistently in organizations struggling with supplier complexity. He said:
“You have so many processes in place. But then when you ask somebody who owns the service, no one does. And it’s like, well, where’s the outcome coming from then?”
That absence of accountability is, he argued, where multi-supplier IT governance most commonly breaks down. Regardless of how well-designed the underlying processes appear on paper.
Final Takeaways
The sessions at UCX Manchester made one thing clear: the gap between organizations that get ITSM right and those that don’t is rarely about the technology they choose. It is about the discipline with which they approach it.
While the technology will keep evolving, the fundamentals will not.
The organizations that get ITSM right in 2026 will not be the ones that buy the most advanced platform. They will be the ones that clean their data, define ownership, bring users with them, and manage suppliers as part of one service ecosystem.
FAQs
What is ITSM?
ITSM stands for IT Service Management. It is the set of processes and practices IT teams use to deliver, support, and improve services like access requests, incident response, and change management.
What is an AI-powered service desk?
An AI-powered service desk uses AI to support service operations. It can summarize tickets, recommend knowledge articles, suggest resolutions, and help route work to the right team. More advanced versions can automate workflows and correlate events across tools.
Why do ITSM tool implementations fail?
Most failures come down to underestimation. Teams underestimate the people, process, and data work required. Adoption also suffers when the project is treated like a technical rollout instead of a business change program.
What is multi-supplier IT governance?
Multi-supplier IT governance is how an organization manages outcomes across multiple IT providers. It focuses on ownership, handoffs, escalations, shared metrics, and accountability so services run smoothly end to end.
What is SIAM, and when should IT leaders use it?
SIAM stands for Service Integration and Management. It applies when multiple suppliers deliver parts of one service. SIAM helps define who owns the service, how work moves between providers, and how performance is measured so the “relay baton” does not get dropped.
Ready to turn these lessons into an action plan? Dive into UC Today’s Ultimate Guide on Service Management & Connectivity.
