Using agents makes managed services operations far more transparent, predictive and proactive.
As enterprise IT environments grow evermore vast and complex, managing the various parts—and ensuring critical systems keep running at peak performance—has become a growing challenge. Many companies struggle to see clearly across their many providers, platforms and internal teams; managed services can feel like a black box, with limited visibility into what’s happening and why. That opacity prevents organizations from acting with speed and confidence.
“Transparency and observability have long been something companies have wanted more of in their managed services environment,” says Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at tech industry analysis firm Lopez Research.
Those operations have traditionally relied on people across the organization creating tickets to flag issues, with humans investigating and resolving them manually. But a new model is emerging—one that uses agentic AI to significantly improve the oversight and management of critical systems.
“Agentic AI represents a paradigm shift for our industry,” says Chris Drumgoole, president of Global Infrastructure Services at DXC Technology, a leading global enterprise IT services provider. “We’re moving away from armies of people to armies of agents doing the work. And we have very smart people who know how to orchestrate and optimize those agents.”
An Agentic-Human Approach
DXC recently launched DXC OASIS, a new managed-services model that combines the workflow automation and insight of agentic AI with human expertise. The DXC OASIS orchestration platform brings together data, workflows and systems across companies’ existing IT environments—actively managing their IT estates in real time.“By combining agentic capabilities with humans, we can ultimately deliver much higher-value outcomes to our clients,” Drumgoole says.
The DXC OASIS platform’s human-centered design was based on many in-depth interviews and workshops with DXC clients around the world—including employees across different business functions and personas beyond IT teams—to understand their biggest challenges and needs. The desire for greater visibility and transparency were key themes that emerged.
Recent major global outages have also made business leaders recognize how reliant they are on their IT systems, and they increasingly see the value of being able to identify and solve any concerns quickly. “They want reliability, security, compliance and value, so that’s what we’re looking to give them with DXC OASIS,” Drumgoole says. “We help run the world’s most critical systems—from airlines to banking to healthcare—and need to respond to events incredibly quickly.”
By combining agentic capabilities with humans, we can ultimately deliver much higher-value outcomes to our clients.
Chris Drumgoole, President of Global Infrastructure Services, DXC Technology
A significant benefit of DXC OASIS, he adds, is that agents can handle many of the routine and traditionally human-performed tasks like analyzing results coming in from event-logging and monitoring systems. Agents work tirelessly around the clock and have the capability to analyze and resolve many common issues automatically—while escalating only those issues that require human judgment and intervention.
Agents, Drumgoole says, can identify and manage significantly more events simultaneously than humans, while allowing humans to focus on the most valuable and strategic parts of their jobs. “We take an approach of true end-to-end persona, meaning our agents can do the same things a human can do in terms of roles and skills,” he says. “So the fact that they can delegate mundane, highly repetitive work that takes hours and hours—and sometimes produces a bit of an indifferent result—is a huge relief and benefit for many of our customers.”
Open, Visible and Proactive
Using AI agents to monitor systems and automatically resolve some issues also allows organizations to be more proactive by uncovering, investigating and resolving potential issues far faster, Lopez says.“It can really take managed services to the next level because you can have all these agents working together at the same time to make sure that everything is working OK and optimized as it should be,” she says. “And it can proactively fix things for you.”
Beyond the sheer value of using agents to do routine work, DXC OASIS also provides predictive, AI-driven intelligence that identifies patterns and forecasts risks, recommending actions to resolve issues before they impact the business. Managed services has traditionally been reactive—responding after an incident or issue arises—so this new agentic-AI-powered model allows companies to act preemptively.
DXC OASIS provides a single unified view across all IT infrastructure so internal teams have ongoing visibility into what agents are doing and what potential issues are being surfaced and resolved. That visibility is tied to various personas within the organization, whether a senior leader or someone who works in cybersecurity, so they get the type and level of insight they need. Likewise, it provides teams with systems performance metrics so they can understand how those tie into business outcomes. By surfacing real-time key performance indicator data alongside operational metrics, DXC OASIS gives IT leaders a clearer way to demonstrate the business value of their managed services environment.
Moreover, the platform includes built-in agent oversight and “reliability engineering” to ensure that the agents perform as expected and produce the intended results. “They’re always watching what the agents are doing,” Drumgoole says. “They’re assessing decision accuracy; they’re ensuring there’s no model drift.”
DXC OASIS is open by design, connecting across the complex, layered technology environments that large enterprises rely on without dictating what those environments must look like.
“At every layer of the architecture stack, we’ve built in openness,” Drumgoole says. “It’s very important for ourselves in terms of the capabilities we offer, but also for our customers who want to leverage different tools. So they greatly value it.”
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