The IT service management (ITSM) landscape is evolving rapidly. The 2025 Gartner Hype Cycle offers IT leaders a sharp lens on where to focus—and where to proceed with caution.
Source: Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2025, 17 June 2025, ID G00827046, By Chris Laske, Siddharth Shetty, Chris Matchett.
ITSM has moved beyond the management of processes and tickets. It is now about building service operations that are intelligent, automated and employee-centered. With AI capabilities maturing, and the digital employee experience (DEX) rising as a priority, organizations that act early will substantially enhance the value of their ITSM organization. The benefits include increased service performance, lower costs, and improved employee satisfaction.
Below, we break down key insights from the report, explain what they mean for decision-makers. We will also show how we can help organizations stay updated in this space.
1. AI is no longer optional, it is a critical enabler
Gartner names AI-powered IT agent advisory, natural language case extraction, and AI-focused problem management as emerging priorities. These innovations are no longer experimental. They are shaping how service desks operate, accelerating incident resolution by providing predictive guidance and deep data insights.
What to focus on: Identify targeted AI use cases that reduce manual work, freeing service management professionals to focus their expertise on higher-value tasks. Implement proactive, AI-driven problem detection, reducing incident counts through intelligent, early root-cause detection and remediation. Provide AI-driven conversational search tools to enable agents to find key information and plan their work.
2. Employee experience has become an ITSM cornerstone
Digital employee experience and DEX tools are labeled “transformational” and are expected to reach mainstream adoption within two years. This represents a shift from traditional service-level management towards more experiential measures. Organizations will assess the performance of the IT organization less on traditional, mechanistic measures (such as ticket closure times), and more on its ability to enhance the performance and experience of the organization’s employees.
What to focus on: Invest in self-service capabilities, intelligent virtual agents, and proactive endpoint management that empower employees and reduce service desk burden. Use AI to personalize employee services, tailor outcomes to needs, and respond proactively to situations and sentiment.
3. Automation needs to pair with resilience
Infrastructure automation, policy as code, and automated incident response are moving through maturity phases, while observability and service response are gaining ground. Organizations are realizing that automation alone is not enough. What matters is combining it with observability to create systems that can detect and recover from issues automatically.
What to focus on: Underpin service management practices and tooling with dynamic service modeling, AIOps, and observability, enabling teams to detect anomalies early, make smarter diagnoses, and create the right response teams the first time to reduce downtime and ensure service continuity.
4. ITSM platforms are mature, and differentiation comes from what is layered on top
We believe, removal of ITSM platforms from the Gartner Hype Cycle shows the market is well established. However, this does not signal the end of innovation for ITSM tools and practices. In fact, ITSM is undergoing rapid evolution, driven by integrated AI, automation, observability, and collaboration, and the closer alignment of service and operations management functions
What to focus on: Choose platforms that provide not only core ITSM functionality but also advanced capabilities that improve operations across IT and the business, including agentic AI, AIOps, and dynamic discovery and modeling of complex enterprise IT infrastructures.
Why BMC is recognized
- BMC is recognized by Gartner as a Sample Vendor in six key categories: Service Response and Event Intelligence: BMC Helix AIOps and Observability combine real-time event detection, root cause identification, and automated remediation. Now, agentic bots such as BMC HelixGPT Situation Observer and BMC HelixGPT Best Action Recommender bring advanced capabilities to service teams, enabling them to make better decisions, enact faster resolutions, and further enhance the resilience and performance of critical IT services. For support experts, agentic chat provides a conversational tool for search, interpretation and planning, helping professionals apply their expertise more effectively. For significant issues, BMC HelixGPT Ops Swarmer brings the right people together quickly, giving them the insights they need to deliver rapid resolutions.
- Technology Dependency Hub: BMC Helix Discovery delivers 100percent enterprise‑wide visibility across all your hybrid and multi‑cloud environments, unifying metrics, logs, traces, and events into a single perspective. To realize their full potential in enterprise IT, AI agents need a complete understanding of the ongoing evolution of the organization’s technology infrastructure—and there is no discovery product better suited to this than BMC Helix Discovery.
- AI Applications and AI-Focused Problem Management: BMC Helix uses AI and machine learning (ML) to cluster incidents, surface root causes, and guide agent decisions. BMC Helix was using large language models for this purpose even before the emergence of well-known generative AI services such as ChatGPT. Our ongoing investment in agentic AI further enhances the early detection and resolution of issues, enabling teams to work collaboratively, guided by highly effective intelligent insights.
- Enterprise Service Management: BMC Helix enables organizations to extend service management practices across HR, finance, facilities, and other departments, driving efficiency and reducing costs. This brings the benefits of BMC’s extensive AI investment to all service centers in the business—not just IT.
Please note that the Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM 2025 names BMC/BMC Software as a Representative Vendor, but for future reports, it will refer to BMC Helix now that the company has split. Post-split (from April 1, 2025), the solutions named as a Representative Vendor in this report are housed under BMC Helix.
Final thoughts
The 2025 Gartner Hype Cycle makes it clear: the future of ITSM belongs to organizations that put people first, use automation and AI with purpose, and connect IT operations to broader business outcomes.
We’re confident we are well positioned in these priority areas, offering an integrated, AI-driven platform that supports employee experience, resilience, and enterprise-wide service management. For IT leaders focused on staying ahead, we provide a strong foundation for transforming service operations and delivering measurable value.
For deeper insights and to explore the key trends shaping the future of service management, access the full 2025 Gartner Hype Cycle for ITSM report with our compliments.
Gartner, Hype Cycle for ITSM, 2025, 17 June 2025, Chris Laske, Siddharth Shetty, Chris Matchett
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