For many teams, incident response begins and ends with an IT Service Management (ITSM) ticket. An alert fires and a ticket is created, assigned, and hopefully resolved. ITSM systems are built on queues, categories, and hand-offs. They are excellent at tracking status. But when it comes to actually resolving incidents, they often become a bottleneck.
Here’s the counter-intuitive truth: Relying on tickets alone can slow your ability to resolve incidents and can increase the workload on your teams when they need clarity and speed the most.
The ticketing trap: Built for logging, not solving
Imagine a critical outage. Your ITSM system opens a ticket, and then what? The problems faced in resolving incidents quickly in this mode include:
- A rigid and linear way of working: Incidents aren’t sequential but tickets force a step-by-step approach, making it hard to adapt to fast-moving complexity or parallel workflows.
- Siloed information: Tickets store data; they don’t interpret it - insights from past incidents, real-time telemetry, and evolving infrastructure context remain disconnected, requiring human correlation and interpretation.
- Manual bottlenecks: Every handoff, escalation, and document search slows things down, so the system has to wait for humans to interpret and act at every step.
- Reactivity by design: A ticket marks the start of the response but doesn’t guide it. It logs the issue but doesn't solve it.
The result? Longer, more stressful incidents, valuable time is lost, teams are scrambling to catch up instead of confidently moving forward, and stakeholders are causing constant interruptions trying to understand where the team is in the process.
The shift: Intelligence in motion with AI-powered runbooks
Cutover, a leading SaaS platform for orchestrated, resilient technology operations, brings AI directly into its automated runbooks. Cutover does not replace your ITSM system, but it introduces a new paradigm shift in how you respond to major incidents.
Where your ticket says what happened, Cutover helps you do something about it with intelligence and confidence.
How Cutover is different:
- Dynamic guidance, not just documentation: Cutover’s AI-powered runbooks don’t just list static steps. Instead, AI tasks can query and understand context. AI integrations can propose tailored diagnostics and recommended next actions and potential solutions based on real-time signals and past outcomes.
- Accelerated resolution: Instead of waiting for someone to interpret a ticket, Cutover AI can suggest next steps, pull relevant data, and even trigger automated diagnostics or remediation, allowing you to move from alert to action in seconds.
- Democratized expertise: AI-powered runbooks make institutional knowledge available to everyone. Even in high-pressure, complex scenarios, every team member can respond like an expert.
- Built-in continuous improvement: While ITSM tools track what happened, Cutover’s AI-powered runbooks generate rich, labeled datasets, ideal for context engineering and training machine learning models to reduce the resolution time for future incidents.
- Human control with AI assistance: Cutover keeps people in charge with human oversight and execution guardrails on AI-driven tasks. All AI-based recommendations are presented for review and approval before being executed, blending automation with human insight to enable accountability and control.
From static tickets to smart action
Your next outage shouldn’t be slowed down by yesterday’s tools.
While ITSM ticketing is essential for tracking and reporting, it’s fundamentally limited in guiding real-time response for major incidents. Cutover’s AI-powered runbooks turn incident handling from a manual, reactive task into a coordinated, intelligent workflow.
Cutover’s AI-powered runbooks bring intelligence in motion, helping you resolve faster, reduce stress, and build more resilient incident response.
To learn more about how Cutover Respond and Cutover AI are revolutionizing the way teams recover from major incidents, minimizing downtime, and safeguarding business continuity, book a demo with us.