The Servicely team attended the Service Desk and IT Support Show, dubbed SITS25, in London last week. We had a great time speaking with IT Service Management and Enterprise Service leaders about the challenges their facing, their service and enterprise-wide objectives, and how their strategies are shifting in 2025. Here’s a roundup of what we saw and what we spoke about at this year’s SITS Conference.

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All About AI

A quick glance at the seminar programme for the event would have tipped you off that Artificial Intelligence would be a major topic of conversation throughout the event. With multiple seminars on AI in Service Management, including sessions from PINK Elephant & ServiceNow, and many exhibitors showcasing their AI capabilities on the expo floor, you couldn’t avoid AI if you tried. We found that our conversations about AI primarily focused on a few key areas.

AI Adoption

While the use of AI tools has become commonplace in both the personal and professional lives of many, with tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini leading the way, the adoption of AI in service management platforms still lags, though not for a lack of trying.

While most businesses are interested in implementing both Agentic AI and Generative AI into their service management processes, many are hitting roadblocks in adopting AI. From our conversations with ITSM leaders, these were the top reasons holding businesses back:

• Their service teams aren’t AI-ready – from a data, process and governance perspective, many were not at a level of data quantity or quality to train AI models to deliver accurate assistance in service management processes
• They found the cost to be prohibitive - Many ITSM leaders who were using service management platforms with AI bolted on felt that the add-on fees to use the AI models were too expensive or restrictive to deliver a positive ROI
• Dissatisfaction with their ITSM or ESM platform – Some didn’t want to go through the AI implementation until they migrated away from a platform that they weren’t happy with

While most businesses were looking to adopt AI service management in the coming months or years, some remain hesitant, citing the less-than-ideal customer experiences that AI can deliver when implemented poorly, and the rapid speed of AI evolution as areas of concern.

The Search for AI-Native Service Management Platforms

As more and more SaaS platforms add on AI tools to keep pace with technology evolution and look to differentiate from their competitors, customers are growing savvier and more critical of how AI is implemented into software. ITSM leaders at SITS25 were seeking platforms designed AI-native, built with AI at the core from their inception.

The sentiment around systems where AI is not a foundational capability, but rather a retrofitted feature bolted on top of an existing (potentially, legacy) system is growing sour. ITSM leaders are seeking future-proof service management platforms that have the flexibility to adapt as AI technologies evolve year on year, and the thought of being version-locked or having to move from one AI add-on to another as these become dated is a nightmare.

CIOs and IT leaders we spoke to were adamant that they were looking to include as many AI-native tools, such as Servicely, in their technology stack, confirming a very bullish attitude towards AI adoption.

The Agentic AI Arms Race

Agentic AI, the AI variant capable of understanding context and making autonomous decisions, is establishing itself as the next evolution in AI. At SITS25, ITSM vendors with Agentic AI capabilities were keen to show off what their AI agents could achieve, with demonstrations showcasing common Agentic AI use cases in service management, including multi-agent orchestration, autonomous ticket resolution, proactive problem management and more.

ITSM leaders were just as interested in Agentic AI as the vendors showcasing their AI, with many conversations discussing when Agentic AI tools would be available, what they could do, and the process for how they could deploy AI agents into their service processes.

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Searching for ServiceNow Alternatives

If you’ve browsed the ServiceNow or any IT-related subreddits recently, you could have seen this trend. There is growing interest from IT leaders in finding legitimate ServiceNow alternatives. While there is no doubt that ServiceNow remains a major player in service management, having just announced their acquisition of Moveworks and CRM offering, there is a substantial number of ServiceNow customers exploring other Enterprise Service Management options that would allow them to migrate away from ServiceNow.

While ServiceNow remains popular amongst Fortune 500 companies and the biggest global enterprises, many customers in the mid-market and mid-enterprise space are citing ever-increasing costs, complexity, and difficulty in dealing with the vendor as primary drivers for change.

CIOs and IT leaders at SITS25 were struggling to find many viable alternatives to ServiceNow, with common requirements being:

• Platform capabilities vs single solution – more than just an ITSM, a true Enterprise Service Management platform that can be used as a single source of record and action across their service teams
• AI-native with Agentic and GenAI capabilities – AI built into the core of the platform, not bolted on
• Flexibility and configurability – the ability to tailor workflows, records and processes to their unique needs. Some also sought the ability to create their own custom applications on their ESM platform
• Modern UI and architecture – easy-to-use for users, as well as being fast, scalable and secure.

As more businesses look to reduce operational costs, we can expect more businesses to seek out modern ServiceNow alternatives like Servicely.

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More Than Just Ticketing

Businesses are no longer content for service management just be “just a ticketing tool”. Attendees at SITS25 were hungry for service management platforms that deliver true Enterprise Service Management capabilities as they look to unify their services into a single system of action and record. While ITSM and CSM are established, structured disciplines, IT leaders are seeking to apply the same discipline and process to other services across the enterprise, including HR, SecOps, Project Management and more.

Additionally, there is growing demand for end-to-end service design, consulting on service management processes, and support from ESM vendors in integrating their other systems into their service management platform to realise the untapped potential of a holistic service management system.

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Reducing IT Operational Costs

The shifting economic pressures and tightening talent market are increasing pressures on IT leaders to cut operational costs, including expenditure on IT systems and platforms. With IT teams also being burdened with driving innovation and productivity gains in many businesses, this places them in a strange duality of having to cut costs while doing more with less.

SITS25 attendees spoke to us of this burden and how they were looking to hit these objectives. In ITSM, the ability to “shift left”, moving service delivery down a tier, multiple tiers, or to AI, is still prevalent. To accomplish this shift, they’re looking to AI and automation to drive faster resolution times or automated resolution via AI, reduced training demands with AI copilots to aid service agents, and the ability to carry out remediations across integrated applications without having to escalate a ticket.

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) was also a bugbear for many, with the cost of both software licenses and development getting out of hand. IT leaders are looking to platforms with low-code/no-code configurability and workflow automation to reduce their development burden and cut reliance on external development consultancies

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Beyond SITS25, What’s Next?

Not only was SITS25 a great event, but it offered an inside look into what’s trending in ITSM and ESM in 2025 and beyond. AI continues to be the key transformative force right now, working to accelerate service delivery for many businesses. With pressure to innovate, increase productivity, and reduce operational costs, IT teams certainly have their work cut out for them. But we’re excited to see more businesses move towards complete enterprise service management in AI-native platforms like Servicely.

As for us, we loved meeting all the innovative and ambitious IT leaders we spoke to and look forward to SITS26 next year!

If you’d like to chat with us about any of these service management trends, you can reach out to us here.

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