Automate Routine Tasks, but Watch Out for AI Hallucinations
The most meaningful AIOps capabilities for small businesses help to automate routine tasks, letting them do more and conserve resources, Kurtz says.
Consider graphic designers, who are using AIOps to speed up their work and produce more options for clients to choose from. Other small businesses rely on AIOps to forecast performance and scale operations.
While most AI systems are pretty accurate, a human in the loop is still necessary to cross-check their output and ensure models aren’t hallucinating, Kurtz says. An AI hallucination is when a system such as a chatbot provides an inaccurate or nonsensical answer based on misinterpretation, incompleteness or bias in the data.
Due to rapid advances in AIOps and the risk of hallucinations, small businesses can’t afford to set AI systems to autopilot.
“AI is revolutionizing how large and small businesses alike operate, but it shouldn’t be hands off the steering wheel,” Kurtz says. “There needs to be a human in the loop.”
Improve Visibility Across Hybrid Environments at an Affordable Rate
Small businesses increasingly find themselves operating hybrid IT environments, where data is stored on-premises, in the cloud or moving between the two. AIOps allows for greater visibility across such environments.
Interested small businesses should consider going the subscription route to reduce overhead.
“Affordable options exist for small businesses, and there are a lot of subscription-based services out there, some starting as low as $50 a month or even offering free tiers of service for basic features,” Kurtz says.
These subscription models are a large part of why SMBs have been able to embrace AI so fast.
UP NEXT: Learn how to reduce burnout among cyber employees.
Automation Takes the Burden Off Small Cyber Teams
Small businesses have small staffs and need to triage cyber incidents quickly without hiring additional personnel. Fortunately, AIOps improves the automation of incident detection and response.
Automating incident detection and response takes the burden off cyber analysts so that they can shift from a reactive to proactive posture, reducing downtime.
Splunk customers have also responded favorably to using natural language processing to structure data queries as opposed to the domain-specific Splunk Search Processing Language, which requires training to learn, Kurtz says. Security operations center analysts have been the primary beneficiaries, with event reporting now automated and easily searchable.
“The AI that we are deploying now is very helpful in the context of SOC operations,” Kurtz says.
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