In January 2022 Atlassian announced the acquisition of Percept.AI, an automated AI support tool. Percept.AI uses AI to power their virtual agent technology, helping organizations automate tier-1 support interactions while allowing for seamless transitions to human experts without context being lost.
This acquisition is big news for Atlassian and in particular Jira Service Management (JSM).
The demand on support staff to offer high-quality, high-velocity solutions to requests has grown exponentially–particularly with the growth of remote teams and organizations. Recognizing the importance of this Atlassian have continually invested in expanding the capabilities of JSM with previous takeovers of Insight, ThinkTilt, and Halp. Percept.AI is yet another example of this.
Percept.AI And What It’ll Do For JSM
The acquisition of Percept.AI strengthens JSM’s ability to “Shift-Left”.
Essentially shifting left is the process by which IT solutions are brought closer to the customer. Both service agents and customers benefit from this–both save time and the cost savings involved can be remarkably large. Potentially hundreds of dollars are lost every time a ticket that could be answered through self-service is not.
With Percept.AI’s virtual agent technology, Atlassian is showing that they recognize the importance of shifting left and the incredible value organizations can glean from it.
So far in JSM one of the main methods of shifting left has been recommended Knowledge Base articles based on search terms (the other major existing feature is Statuspage).
However, Atlassian has recognized that the way that customers want to deal with support has changed and that knowledge base prompts are no longer enough. 71% of consumers would prefer to deal with a virtual assistant rather than static pages and we all know why–knowledge base portals are impersonal, transactional, and often alienating to deal with.
Users want a more immersive experience that will provide them personalized and immediate responses in language that they are familiar with. People want to deal with virtual agents the way they would deal with real agents and Percept.AI is excellent at doing this with its conversational AI engine that analyses and understands intent, sentiment, context, and profile information to personalize interactions.
How The ITSM Market Stacks Up
As we have noted before, Jira Service Management is the most dynamic and cost-effective ITSM solution available today. We’ve calculated that while the average JSM customer pays around $33,000 a year, the average ServiceNow customer pays over $362,000.
Furthermore, when looking at how the platforms have developed over the past few years, we’ll see that JSM’s price (although it has increased slightly recently) really hasn’t kept pace with the incredible additional value that has been added to it. Takeovers like this one of Percept.AI show that Atlassian is not resting on its laurels and is continuing to add value across the board.
When considering the relative cost of these tools, combined with the fact that most organizations are already supporting SDLC/DevOps in Jira Software, moving to JSM seems like the logical choice for most organizations.
Jira Software and Jira Service Management are naturally very tightly integrated and given the amount of unplanned work that Agile teams are doing this is incredibly important.
38% of developers spend up to 1/4 of their time fixing bugs–and the economic impact of this unplanned work is something we’re looking more into. At the very least organizations should be integrating more tightly between ServiceNow and Jira Software (while the most efficient solution would be switching to JSM from ServiceNow).
Product investment is paying dividends for Atlassian and solidifying its position as a major player in this market. According to Forrester’s overview of ITSM tools, remarkable improvements to JSM’s “current offering” from 2020 to 2022 have put it on par with ServiceNow as a “leader” in the ITSM space.
As Figure 4 shows, Gartner agrees that JSM is already strong on Self-Service/Request Fulfillment (higher than ServiceNow’s 4.3). This takeover of Percept.AI demonstrates that Atlassian is not resting on its laurels–demonstrating why it is the most dynamic product in the ITSM space.
Atlassian has made a number of canny acquisitions to strengthen the offering of JSM over the past few years and Percept.AI is the latest of these. We look forward to seeing how Percept.AI and JSM work together in the future.
Get in touch with us at sales@contegix.com if you want to learn more about JSM and how it can serve you.