In my first two blogs in this three-part series, “Agentic AI and the IT Balancing Act: Saving Costs While Prioritizing People” and “Fix Enterprise Search with Agentic AI, and the Sky’s the Limit on Buy-In,” we explored how agentic AI can reduce the operational burden, freeing your people to do more high-value work. And we discussed the importance of picking an agentic AI use case that solves a real pain point and is easily scalable.
To wrap things up, I want to address the very real pressure IT leaders are facing right now to deliver real-world financial results with AI. (Especially when you consider the fact that some businesses have committed to nine-figure savings from agentic AI.) The technology IS here. And spoiler alert: the answer to these savings isn’t an either/or proposition of AI versus headcount reduction.
Yes, your people are afraid of AI-driven layoffs. But that’s because they don’t understand the full financial picture. So, leadership has an opportunity—and a duty—to help our teams understand how they will continue to deliver compelling value for decades to come in an agentic AI future that’s already here. It isn’t just about reducing the current workforce. It’s just as much about how to do more with the workers that you already have.
So, let’s talk about three opportunities for agentic AI to drive value in resetting the economics of enterprise IT—turning theory into action.
- Accelerate workforce productivity
- Reduce non-headcount IT spend
- Manage the economics of your transformation … across the company.
What does this look like?
Accelerate workforce productivity
To start, you can use AI agents to extend and amplify your workforce across both IT and the business.
For example, you can automate mundane IT work. In fact, Gartner® predicts “agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80 percent of common customer service issues without human intervention by 2029.”*
You can better leverage your senior IT staff by letting them focus on making decisions with complete situational context assembled by agents. In our recent BMC Helix Roadshow in London, we were reminded by our keynote speaker, Google Cloud Engineer Manager Drew Jarrett, that many of these folks are working well over 100 percent of expectation. Some are at 200 percent. Getting them back down to 100 percent and reducing the burnout is a huge benefit.
You can also improve productivity on the business side. BMC Helix was a first-mover in agentic AI, and we offer a roster of out-of-the-box AI agents—constantly expanding across the ServiceOps lifecycle—that are ready to support you.
Reduce non-headcount IT spend
Not to bury the lede, but let’s talk more about headcount. While it can be a “third rail” topic, it’s an important one that you can’t avoid. And there’s good news for folks who worry that nine-figure savings will be achieved only through headcount reduction. That’s just not the case. The financial impact of agentic AI goes well beyond headcount reduction, and that’s something our teams aren’t hearing about enough. As leaders, we need to understand this because it will help motivate team members to embrace AI instead of digging in their heels.
With agentic AI solutions like our BMC Helix ServiceOps portfolio, there are plenty of opportunities for non-headcount cost savings. For example, you can:
- Maximize your vendor strategy. Specifically, you can deliver an end-to-end agentic AI strategy that works with your tech strategy to maximize cloud credits, reuse large language models (LLMs), and move to cloud-smart deployment models across enterprise IT.
- Make a cost-smart transformation. Improving capacity management and adopting cloud-smart strategies have helped BMC Helix customers save big. One customer saved tens of millions just by improving its capacity planning.
- Manage software costs. Avoid vendors that nickel-and-dime you with unpredictable, fragmented pricing, which makes it harder to forecast costs and scale efficiently. BMC Helix has transparent pricing—no surprise upcharges, no fragmented contracts, and no delays in activating the capabilities you need.
Manage the economics of your transformation
Finally, when it comes to resetting the economics of enterprise IT, AI agents can help you manage the costs of your transformation in a variety of ways.
First, they can help you improve agility to de-risk change. Specifically, with agentic-AI powered discovery, asset management, and change risk planning, you can not only reduce the risk of change, you can also speed up innovation.
Second, after you’ve de-risked change and have more agility, AI agents can help you unlock the ability to take on at least one more high-value project each year. Many CIOs have a backlog of positive-NPV (Net Present Value) proposals shelved due to limited resources.
This is big.
There’s only so much change that an IT organization can take on at one time. But, what if you were able to get a lot more agile? If you could do another project this year, I bet your team has a stack of proposals that can deliver compelling ROI to the organization. Doing just one more incremental project lets you deliver more financial impact—whether it’s implementing a procurement system or any number of different proposals on a CIO’s desk. That’s the third way to get nine-figure results.
How will you know when you’re successful?
AI agents can provide you with a CFO-ready business case. This is another biggie. No more vague return on investment (ROI) projections or soft productivity claims. With BMC HelixGPT, every AI-driven action is tracked, quantified, and directly tied to cost savings. One of our customers that processes nearly three million HR cases per year automated its HR agent summary—a small but repetitive task.
With BMC HelixGPT Service Collaborator’s AI-generated summaries based on digital interactions and metadata, the company saved an average of three minutes per case. That’s $2.9M in annual savings. Not “soft savings” where people are “working faster,” but hard, CFO-approved financial impact from real efficiency gains that directly reduce costs.
The time for enterprise-wide agentic AI is now
Resetting the economics of enterprise IT is a real opportunity with ServiceOps and agentic AI. The technology is here, the business needs remain urgent, and the expectations are sky high. And with BMC Helix agentic AI capabilities, you can get results across the enterprise. We invite you to partner with us to lead the transformation and reimagine what’s possible.
*Gartner Press Release, Gartner Predicts Agentic AI Will Autonomously Resolve 80% of Common Customer Service Issues Without Human Intervention by 2029, March 2025, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-03-05-gartner-predicts-agentic-ai-will-autonomously-resolve-80-percent-of-common-customer-service-issues-without-human-intervention-by-20290.
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
