AI Agents Fixing Your IT Before You Even Know Something Broke | Erhan Giral & Ryan Manning, BMC Helix
Most enterprise IT teams spend the majority of their time fighting the same fires repeatedly. BMC Helix is building the AI system that handles those fires automatically, detecting anomalies, tracing root cause through millions of asset relationships, generating remediation plans, and learning from every incident it resolves. Craig Smith sits down with Erhan Giral, VP of AI Strategy and Innovation at BMC Helix, and Ryan Manning, Chief Product Officer at BMC Helix, to explain how agentic AI is transforming IT service management from a reactive, human-driven process into something closer to a self-healing system, and why doing that at enterprise scale requires a fundamentally different architecture than most AI deployments attempt. The most technically interesting part of this conversation is where BMC Helix is headed: building "gyms", synthetic data center environments where AI agents deliberately break things and learn to fix them overnight, 24 hours a day, generating the bespoke operational training data that text-based foundation models can no longer provide. Erhan describes an architecture of specialized sub-agents, anomaly detection, log analysis, root cause analysis, remediation planning, that work in a hierarchy, passing hypotheses between each other until they converge on an answer, fine-tuned to reason the way a specific enterprise's best IT engineer would rather than the way a generic documentation page reads. For customers, the results are measurable: 25 to 50% cost reduction, fewer recurring outages, and IT staff who can finally go home at a predictable time rather than spending their nights firefighting problems that could have been prevented. Subscribe to Eye on A.I. for weekly conversations with the people building and deploying the future of AI.