Your Managed Services Team Is Burning Money While AI Sits on the Bench
Why Your Brightest IT Minds Are Stuck Doing Digital Drudgery
After twenty years as a Fractional CIO, I’ve seen the same tragedy play out repeatedly: brilliant Managed Services teams haemorrhaging resources on soul-destroying repetitive work whilst AI sits doing at best “Proof-of-concepts”. The technology that could liberate them remains feared, misunderstood, or gathering dust.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Comments Craig Ashmole, Fractional CIO at Straightalking Consulting, “AI isn’t coming for jobs. It’s coming for the mind-numbing tasks holding talented people back from actual problem-solving. But you can’t sprinkle AI magic dust and expect miracles. You need strategy, and that starts with fractional engagement.”
Why Fractional Changes Everything
Permanent leadership can’t spot operational blind spots. When you’re in the trenches daily, inefficiency becomes invisible. It’s just “how we’ve always done things.”
Fractional support removes organisational politics. They have no historical baggage, just uncomfortable questions: Why are analysts manually categorising 3,000 tickets weekly when AI could handle 80% in milliseconds? Why spend sixteen hours monthly on capacity reports that could auto-generate?
Fractional engagement brings C-suite thinking without permanent overhead. More critically, it brings cross-pollinated ideas from dozens of organisations, not just one.
Finding the Leaks
Real assessment means forensically examining where time, money, and human potential are wasted. I shadow teams for a week and consistently discover highly skilled engineers spending 40-60% of their time on administrative overhead, data entry, and chasing information that should flow automatically.
We map three dimensions: technical landscape, human frustration points, and data flows. Where these intersect, AI opportunities reveal themselves.
The killer insight? The cost of not acting. When I show leadership that their ticketing backlog alone costs $40,000 monthly in extended resolution times, the business case becomes unavoidable.
Building the Target Operating Model
Most AI initiatives stumble here. Organisations get seduced by shiny technology without thinking through operational reality.
A robust TOM focuses on augmentation, not replacement. AI handles predictable, repetitive work. Humans tackle ambiguous, creative challenges. AI triages 90% of service requests automatically and predicts failures before they occur. Your people focus on the 10% requiring genuine judgment and building strategic relationships.
The best TOMs embed continuous improvement. Technology evolves rapidly. Your operating model needs flexibility to evolve with it.
Where AI Dreams Die
Brilliant AI solutions fail because organisations forget to bring people along. Fear and mistrust torpedo even technically sound implementations.
Transparency is everything. Teams need to understand not just what AI does, but how and why. When we implement automated ticket classification, we show analysts the decision-making logic and confidence scores. AI transforms from black box to colleague.
Craig goes on to state,”We never talk about “replacing headcount.” We frame AI as liberating people from digital drudgery. When analysts tell me they’re excited because AI freed twenty hours monthly for proactive problem-solving, that’s success.”
Every AI application includes explicit guardrails: what decisions it makes autonomously, what requires human oversight, and what happens when it fails. We celebrate wins and learn from failures publicly.
The Bottom Line
Organisations I’ve guided through this journey see 25-40% operational cost reductions within eighteen months. Not through cuts, but through radical efficiency. Time to resolution drops. First-contact resolution soars. Employee satisfaction improves because people finally do interesting work.
But the real transformation goes beyond cost. AI-enhanced Managed Services become competitive advantage, enabling proactive support and freeing budget for innovation rather than keeping lights on.
The question isn’t whether AI will transform Managed Services because it already is. The question is whether you’ll lead that transformation or scramble to catch up when it’s no longer optional.
After twenty plus years, I know which organisations I’m betting on.
by Craig Ashmole, Fractional CIO, UK and Dubai UAE
I've lived in the world of Corporate CIOs long enough to know: The biggest challenges are best solved together. That's why I'm sharing my blog as a forum where IT leaders share hard-won lessons and chart the path forward, post-pandemic, post-playbook, and ready for what's next as AI takes over the world.
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