IT departments are drowning in routine tasks, such as resetting passwords, managing devices, and juggling access requests. This busywork drains time and stalls innovation. But AI may offer a way out.

New tools like autonomous bots and knowledge graphs are helping companies like automate IT workflows end-to-end, slashing costs and freeing up teams for higher-value work. As AI begins to reshape the IT landscape, the question isn’t if it will change things, but how fast.

As reported by Wall Street Journal on August 14^th, 2025, by Belle Lin.

IT Departments Are Overloaded With Busy Work. Can AI Change That?

Information-technology departments within corporations deal with a lot of busy work—from answering tech support questions to giving employees access to laptops and phones.

That’s exactly why one startup is aiming to use artificial intelligence and a “knowledge graph” to automate those mundane IT tasks, building what it calls a “system of intelligence” that can connect multiple data systems together to provide a comprehensive overview of what’s going on inside a company’s IT department.

XperiencOps, a startup also known as XOPS that has raised nearly $40 million from Activant Capital and FPV Ventures, is part of a new wave of tech vendors and venture capitalists that believe IT can be greatly streamlined by AI and other technologies.

The broader market for IT automation tools is currently dominated by vendors such as ServiceNow, IBM and Cisco’s Splunk, analysts say. IT research and consulting firm Gartner predicts that by next year, 30% of enterprises will automate more than half of their network activities—that’s up from less than 10% of enterprises in mid-2023.

That’s because IT departments traditionally have fragmented data across various systems, making it hard for staff to track down which employees have access to which laptops and software, who should be eligible for upgrades, who should have the right access when traveling—the list goes on.

Replacing human ‘middleware’

The idea behind XOPS is that “human middleware,” or individuals among a company’s IT staff who manually connect data between disparate systems, have large amounts of menial work they shouldn’t have to do, said Mayan Mathen, XOPS’s co-founder and chief executive.

“What if we built software robots that did work that humans shouldn’t have to?” Mathen said.

XOPS, which leverages software bots to manage a company’s IT policies, first creates a so-called knowledge graph from diverse data sources like software systems, databases and data centers. This knowledge graph is like a database that represents information similar to the way maps do, and can show relationships between people, ideas and documents.

Stanley Toh, Broadcom’s head of enterprise end-user services and experience, said the chip giant employs an IT staff of about 40 workers to support its roughly 50,000 employees. That means it needs the support of a technology solution to boost what its staff can do, he said.

To make the XOPS system work, Broadcom gave it 17 sources of data to build a knowledge graph on, including mobile billing, data-center monitoring and information security data. Taken all together, XOPS created a profile of each device within Broadcom—making it easy for the human IT worker to track every change to an employee’s laptop or phone.

Broadcom uses XOPS to autonomously manage the entire “life cycle” of an employee laptop, Toh said, replacing what was formerly a manual process in which IT staff were involved every step along the way, from selecting and delivering an employee’s laptop to servicing and returning it when the employee leaves the company.

“The only time I need a human is to put the laptop in a box, slap on the shipping label and drop it at the receiving store to be shipped out,” Toh said. “The other one is when the laptop comes back, they check it back in.”

Toh said the benefit of XOPS is reducing the amount of downtime for Broadcom engineers who can’t get work done without a functioning laptop. XOPS also enables Broadcom to eliminate the amount of unused laptop inventory in warehouses, as well as reduce the number of software licenses that aren’t being used by employees.

Eliminating that software spend, Toh said, is millions of dollars each year in cost savings.

XOPS isn’t alone in attempting to apply new approaches to the field of corporate IT. Prior waves of AI have given rise to the concept of AIOps for IT, or “artificial intelligence for IT operations”—the idea that machine learning can be deployed to monitor sprawling, dispersed tech systems.

One difference now is that today’s AI systems are much more powerful than the machine learning models of the past—they are capable of “reasoning” or thinking across complicated topics, and “agentic” systems can take action on behalf of humans, said Arun Chandrasekaran, a Gartner distinguished vice president analyst.

But the problems that existed over a decade ago remain.

Enterprises and chief information officers need to keep good track of their corporate data in order for it to be ingested by AI, and IT staff must be trained alongside it to not fear a job takeover and trust the technology, Chandrasekaran added.

“There’s a lot of fear that we are dealing with extremely mission-critical and business-critical systems,” he said, “and even if the AI systems are capable of orchestrating some of that, the humans don’t yet have the trust that AI is able to do that very effectively.”