AI summaries of texts: tips and importance in ITSM

Summaries: Why Are They Important?

Promptness and having a good overview play significant roles in professional life. Yet, there is often not enough time to go through long texts and concentrate on them sufficiently. Consider the flood of information we’re faced with daily:

• Research papers
• News articles
• Tickets
• Notifications
• Presentations

In order to be able to work efficiently, summaries should be used. There has always been lots of value in having essential information presented in a condensed, clear and easy-to-understand format. Well summarized documents save time and helps the reader produce better results: Key points in the right place are significantly more useful than documents with too much detail.

The AI Path

Artificial intelligence (AI) now offers new ways of summarizing texts, information and data with just one click. The main advantage is that the reader is immediately provided with the essential information without having to search for it for a long time beforehand.

This form of automation makes it possible to reduce complexity and quickly gain clarity. This is an enormous advantage, especially when it comes to customer support, decision-making or problem management. An AI summarizing tool, therefore, offers great benefits.

Generative AI: definition

The term generative AI describes artificial intelligence that can generate new content or data. This type of AI is trained using existing data. In contrast to other types of AI, the aim is not to solve tasks or recognize data patterns, but to create something new.

Generative AI is used, for example, to create texts, images, videos or music. It can also be used in business to create new designs or solutions, check contracts for compliance or analyze large amounts of data. AI can also improve customer interactions, for example as part of a self-service portal or knowledge base.

It uses machine learning (ML) to recognize patterns and relationships in data sets. The AI learns by gaining access to content generated by humans, on the basis of which it can create ever better and more authentic content itself. Typical tasks include ai based summaries, chat bot question-and-answer sessions, draft texts and much more.

AI Text Summarizer Tools

In this section, we take a closer look at how companies benefit from AI-generated summaries and how these can best be achieved.

Advantages and benefits

We have already highlighted that there are plenty of benefits to be gained when a suitable AI summarizes texts.

Companies…

• … save time and effort.
• … act more efficiently.
• … achieve consistent results.
• … receive personalized content through targeted input.
• … make more informed decisions thanks to a better overview.
• … manage risk better thanks to a wide range of information.
• … have texts in different languages more quickly with multilingual AI.
• … enhance their knowledge base with linked summaries.

It is clear that companies or individual employees can benefit from advanced AI. This leads to companies becoming more efficient and competitive.

Tips for Good AI Summaries

Users need to know how a summarizing tool works so that they can make the most of the technology. There are differences in summaries – especially in terms of their quality and usefulness.

The background to this is that there are different ideas when it comes to correspondence such as emails, ticket systems or even records and minutes. Accordingly, it makes a big difference what type of AI-generated summary is desired: while some users purely need content (ex. a good overview), others may need a history (ex. to understand certain processes). Users therefore need to be precise in their requests.

Here are some helpful tips for using AI profitably and getting the summary results you need.

Tip #1: Select texts carefully

Not every document, ticket or documentation is relevant and informative enough to produce a meaningful summary. Take care when selecting the texts to be summarized. Companies should not simply enter all texts (in a specific context) into an AI, but should make a thorough pre-selection. This ensures that truly relevant, useful and profitable content is created.

Tip #2: Formulate entries clearly and precisely

It is advisable to enter clear and detailed instructions in the input box when seeking a summary. AI tools understands clear and precise information. This helps it generate corresponding summaries. For example, it makes a difference whether an AI should summarize key messages, specific events or chronological sequences.

Some tools also have settings and parameters that can be adjusted. In this case, it is advisable to experiment with them in order to achieve the best possible results.

Tip #3: Take context into account

We know from everyday experiences: Context gives statements completely different meanings – sometimes even contrary ones.

It is the same with AI: The tool has to understand the context of the original text correctly in order to be able to output a valid summary. This is particularly critical for content with complex contexts. The more information and training an AI has at its disposal, the better it can apply contexts correctly.

Tip #4: Check summaries

As far-reaching and advanced as generative AI is, it is always advisable to carry out at least a brief check of the results. Particularly when implementing an AI, those involved should evaluate the extent to which the summaries meet the requirements set.

It can be useful to do this using a few examples of content to make sure the results fit each time. If not, the AI summary tool can be adapted through more training and context.

Tip #5: Give feedback

Feedback is a simple but often underestimated way to improve workflows and optimize processes. Giving regular feedback to an AI improves its performance. In many cases, just one click (thumbs up/thumbs down) is enough for the AI to continuously develop its capabilities.

AI Summaries in ITSM

Adequate summaries prove to be extremely helpful in IT service management. After all, the infrastructure and customers depend on IT to keep work humming along.

For this reason, speed matters. IT professionals need to be able to quickly understand a situation and its history at a glance. An AI summarizer is perfect for helping agents gain a complete, immediate and detailed overview of support requests, issues or change management processes in a ticket system.

Supported by AI, teams speed up, more customers are helped and the business can add more value.

Summarizing Tickets – The Most Important Points

Companies that offer service or product support often have to deal with situations where there is a broad range of communication across plenty of channels and threads. This can quickly add up to more than a hundred messages attached to a single ticket. At that point, it is too time-consuming and difficult for support teams to extract the most important information.

A “ticket summary button” is a solution that is as innovative as it is useful. Just click the summarize button and immediately receive a structured summary of the content of a ticket – differentiated according to customers (inquiries, comments, etc.) and employees (answers, instructions, assistance, etc.).

Here is an overview of the advantages of AI-supported ticket summaries:

• Simple, intuitive analysis of content: The summaries form a quick and easy way to capture the content of tickets – including attachments.
• Sharpened focus and better decisions: As the AI extracts the essential and most relevant information, employees can immediately focus on the essentials and quickly provide qualified and helpful feedback. What’s more, the sharpened overview tends to result in better decisions.
• Structure and overview: A few compact summaries are much easier to keep track of than long message sequences. Both the work and the people involved can be summarized, presenting a concise overview.
• Configurability: An AI summary generator tool can be set according to individual requirements so that administrators can adapt its behavior. For example, different aspects of conversations can be given focus or adjustments can be made to the desired structure.
• Consistency: AI-generated summaries – with the same settings – do not differ significantly from one another. This means that employees quickly get used to a certain type of summary, driving even more speed. Human-generated summaries, on the other hand, sometimes differ greatly from one to the next. This factor is another reason why AI enables more efficient work.

From the Summary to the Knowledge Base – with AI

AI summaries can sometimes have similarities to knowledge bases – both are part of structured and targeted information management. If information is initially scattered in tickets, summaries filter out the relevant information. The most useful information can then find its way into knowledge bases.

The path from ticket to knowledge base is usually a long one. Lots of relevant information is lost, ignored or unorganized. This makes the relevant knowledge unusable.

Fortunately, there are options. In order to be efficient and benefit sufficiently from knowledge, use the following:

1. A ticket system with an AI function that can quickly summarize content in a concise and helpful way.
2. A structured knowledge base that can be accessed centrally and easily.
3. A “Summary2Knowledge” function to easily convert summarized ticket content into knowledge base articles (KBA).

The latter is an innovative AI application that simplifies and optimizes knowledge management. In short: companies benefit more and more directly from their knowledge. Relevant information from tickets can be automatically converted into a knowledge base using AI. This increases the added value from tickets immensely and creates optimized information flows.

Further advantages of using AI summaries in the knowledge base are:

• Knowledge base articles are given a uniform structure and are therefore better organized.
• Automatic keyword and tag suggestions make it easier to find articles in the knowledge base.

Conclusion: AI Summaries Add Value

Managing a multitude of tasks and information is one of the central challenges of everyday working life. Summaries are a useful way of gaining a profound overview of relevant content.

AI now helps enormously by making this process quick, intuitive and consistent. Companies can use this technology to operate more efficiently, optimize their information management and make better decisions.

This can bring enormous progress, particularly in ITSM and other service roles, as employees can gain clarity about their support tickets much faster and take the right action. If the relevant content can also be easily connected to a knowledge base, companies can optimally convert and utilize really important content. Relevant knowledge becomes usable in an intuitive and clear way.

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