The Service Desk Institute (SDI) has been connecting service professionals across the world since 1988 and is the leading global community for everyone working in the service and support industry. Our mission is to inspire service desks and support teams to be brilliant.

With a passion for providing industry best practice and sharing knowledge, SDI is dedicated to guiding, inspiring, and connecting ITSM, service desk and support communities. A respected, trusted and independent advisor to the industry, SDI has inspired thousands of organisations and professionals around the world to embark on journeys of service improvement and to be the best they can possibly be. For more information, visit www.servicedeskinsitute.com

Every day, your team pushes the same boulder up the mountain - tickets pile up, users complain, and tomorrow brings the exact same challenges. But what if that rock could stay at the top? What if your service desk could actually prevent problems instead of just reacting to them?

The most successful IT teams have discovered something revolutionary: every major incident leaves breadcrumbs. This session reveals how Freshservice's intelligent incident management and CMDB capabilities help you connect those dots before disaster strikes.

What you'll discover:
o Predict before you react: Use Freshservice's incident patterns and CMDB relationships to identify brewing problems before they explode
o Connect the invisible dots: Map asset dependencies and change impacts that most teams never see coming
o Turn chaos into clarity: Transform scattered incident data into actionable intelligence that actually prevents future fires

This session is perfect for IT leaders tired of playing defense and ready to get ahead of their next crisis.

Your CMDB is lying to you: What Greek tragedies teach us about incident management (and how to fix yours)

How does a College based in Lancashire UK, become the first academic institution and public sector organisation to achieve 'World - Class' Service Desk Certification status? 
How did the IT Services department go from “uncertifiable” to 5-Star, and what impact and value has this created?

Join us for an exclusive session with Runshaw College’s Head of IT Services Alex Harding, as he shares their story, the challenges they faced, and the measurable outcomes they achieved.

In this webinar, you’ll discover:

• Runshaw's inspiring Service Desk Certification Journey
• Challenges and obstacles 
• How Runshaw improved productivity by +23% despite increasing ticket volumes
• How customer satisfaction (CSAT) rose from 4.5 to 4.96/5, climbing every year post-Certification.
• What it takes to embed a culture of continual improvement and sustain world-class performance.
• Return on Investment (ROI) figures to shout about.

Whether you’re a CIO, IT service leader, or service desk manager, this is your chance to hear real-world insights from a team that proved the ROI of IT support, gained industry recognition, and built trust across their organisation.

 Don’t miss the opportunity to learn how your service desk can follow in Runshaw’s footsteps and achieve staggering results like theirs.

The Road To World Class: How Runshaw Became The 1st Educational Organisation to Achieve 5 Star Certification

In this session, we will explore how Virtual Personal Assistants (VPAs) are revolutionizing service desk operations, enabling teams to "Automate, Elevate, Innovate". This session is designed for service desks seeking to harness AI and automation for greater efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Discover how AI has evolved into essential business infrastructure, representing a "fundamental paradigm shift" where AI agents actively solve problems. This empowers your team to become smarter, faster, and truly future-proof.

Rina will guide you through the "AI Paradox," demonstrating how to implement AI and automation to enhance—not replace—the human touch.  You'll learn to balance operational efficiency with emotional intelligence (EQ) by building automation strategies that preserve personalization and reinforce trust. 

This talk isn't just about improving your service desk; it's about building a high-impact, future-proof career in IT Service Management (ITSM). Rina will introduce her book, "The ITSM Playbook®," as your strategic roadmap to navigate corporate challenges and build a career path to a six-figure salary. Learn to communicate your impact beyond technical jargon, securing your seat at the leadership table.

The Super Agent: How a VPA Makes Your Team Smarter, Faster, and Future-Proof

Designing with intent: shaping trusted digital workers to serve with confidence and care

AI may grab the headlines, but Intelligent Automation (IA) is where real transformation happens. IA serves as the container that unites all automation tools and methods—including AI—into a coordinated system designed to deliver human-centered, outcome-driven results.This session explores how to achieve a sensible blend of human and AI-supported work—where assistants help you do more, stress less, and protect the quality of your results. Whether you operate in healthcare, finance, government, manufacturing, or within an IT organization, the principles of IA apply across all service-driven industries.You’ll learn why assist before you agentify is the smarter approach, how governance and guardrails sustain trust, and how data management ensures automation remains safe and meaningful. We’ll also decipher the emerging field of agentic AI—exploring the discrete designs and roles of assistants and agents—alongside the growing skills of prompt crafting (for assistants) and prompt engineering (for agent design). Finally, we’ll look at how cost control through measured consumption keeps innovation sustainable.This is automation done right—human-centric, outcome-driven, and ready for the next evolution of service management across every service-based enterprise.

When AI Works with You: The Human Side of Intelligent Automation

This session guides organizations on checking if they are ready for AI. It explains how to assess goals, data, infrastructure, skills, and culture before adoption. The focus is on setting clear expectations and starting small to avoid failure.

How to Assess AI Readiness for Service Delivery

While organizations are rushing to adopt AI, the question of governance and risk management is becoming more and more important.

How to balance the benefits of early adoption and effective management on AI risks? ITIL offers a practical AI risk management approach based on the ITIL 6C model for AI capabilities. It allows to identify and assess AI risks in the organization’s context and find relevant and effective countermeasures.

Watch this session to learn about:

·        The typical AI risks

·        The ITIL 6C model for AI functional capabilities

·        A practical approach to AI risk assessment and management.

AI in ITSM: the 6C model for planning and risk management

The three most common root causes of failed Changes are failed communication, poor underlying documentation(CMDB), and not getting “the right” approvals.  These 3 distinct causes all have a common denominator the processes required to execute well contrast with natural human behavior.  Communication is always a challenge in large organizations. No one enjoys keeping the CMDB up-to-date, and it’s easy to forget every single person who should approve a change and we end up going with the default people. AI can address each of these root causes efficiently and effectively. In this session you’ll be introduced you to a new process with AI augmentation that aligns with natural human behaviors. We’ve infused this process into our change enablement function and haven’t had a roll back since.

Utilizing AI in your Change Management/Enablement

AI is transforming service desks—but if we’re not careful, speed can come at the cost of connection.

In this session, Dr. Josh Nelson explores how to implement AI and automation in ways that enhance—not replace—the human touch. As service operations scale, the challenge isn’t just doing more with less. It’s doing better with intent.

You’ll learn how to build automation strategies that preserve emotional intelligence (EQ), personalize interactions at scale, and reinforce trust in every experience. Drawing from real-world insights, Josh will show how to identify where automation adds value—and where human connection still matters most.

Key takeaways:

How to scale service without losing personalization or empathy

Where to apply automation for real impact (and where not to)

Balancing operational efficiency with emotional intelligence

Building AI-driven workflows that feel intentional, responsive, and human

Walk away with a framework for delivering smart, scalable service—without sacrificing what makes it personal.

AI Meets EQ: Automating Service Without Losing Human Connection

Enterprise resilience today is defined less by how quickly organizations recover, and more by how proactively they respond. IT service management has long been central to this resilience, providing stability when disruptions occur. Now, weaving AI into core ITSM practices can further reinforce that resilience and add a stronger proactive edge.

But as of today, AI in ITSM is just getting started with smarter ticketing that is driven by intelligent triaging, ticket summarization, and, at best, conversational assistance for L1 requests. While useful, these capabilities alone are not enough to drive resilience. 

To achieve true resilience, AI must be deeply infused into core areas such as major incident response and change management. Join us for this 20-minute session where we explore the limitations of current best-practice ITSM without AI and then reimagine how AI advancements can enable faster, smarter, and more resilient incident response and change implementation. 

Key takeaways:

Explore a seven-step AI roadmap for ITSM that guides organizations in strategically integrating AI across everyday workflows.

Embrace an AI-assisted, human-led incident response strategy, where AI supports incidents diagnosis and delivers crucial insights, enabling IRT members to act faster and minimize downtime.

Minimize change risks with AI agents acting as shadow change managers, suggesting foolproof rollout plans, detecting conflicts early, and ensuring safer change implementations.

Shaping Enterprise resilience with AI-driven ITSM that moves with the times

This webinar explores the practical applications and transformative impact of artificial intelligence and automation across American industries in 2025. Based on comprehensive analysis of current market developments, we examine how AI has evolved from experimental technology to essential business infrastructure, reshaping everything from consumer interactions to enterprise operations.The presentation demonstrates that we are witnessing not merely incremental technological progress, but a fundamental paradigm shift where AI agents actively solve problems rather than simply respond to queries. This transformation is supported by unprecedented infrastructure investments and breakthrough capabilities that are democratizing access to sophisticated automation tools.

Transforming America's Technological Landscape in 2025

As the Experience Management Office (XMO) becomes a more common feature in organizations, the discussion on the right tools to support it is becoming more lively. Many organizations are building their own custom tools, while software companies are offering a range of solutions. There is a frequent question about how tooling will evolve in the Experience Economy, which tools will adapt from the "Service Economy," and what new ones will emerge.

Tooling In The Age of Experience

This presentation offers a strategic perspective on the evolution of experience management within Technology Services, focusing on the journey led by XMO DXC in partnership with the client VALE. Through the implementation of the XLA methodology, we explore how operational challenges were overcome and transformed into opportunities for value creation. Practical lessons will be shared on maturity, purpose, and sustainability in building meaningful and lasting customer experiences.

Experience as a Journey: Strategic Evolution Through Purpose and Practice

Get ready to see how T-Mobile is revolutionizing digital support for its employees! 

In a compelling presentation, Kym Bowen will reveal how her team leveraged XLAs to design a first-of-a-kind-AI-powered support tools.

Frustrated with cumbersome tools and a lack of trust in phone support, T-Mobile's team developed an intelligent helper. This innovative solution seamlessly integrates centralized knowledge with an easy-to-use chat experience. You'll discover how this initiative transforms employee support by reducing friction and rebuilding trust in digital tools. This is a powerful case study in how listening to your employees can drive real, transformative change.

T-Mobile Technology XLA Journey

In this session by Sami Kallio, you’ll learn how to get started with XLAs — not just in theory, but through four real-world case studies from HappySignals customers across different industries. You will discover how these organizations have shifted from traditional SLAs to experience-driven outcomes. Whether you're just exploring XLAs or ready to implement them, this talk will leave you inspired and equipped with practical insights to take the first easy step

Getting started with XLAs: Four inspirational cases from real customers

Case Study: Putting Experience First

Our customers' experience shows the power of prioritizing experience. Join Kyndryl's Dennis and Chris as they reveal real-world case studies where focusing on employee and customer experience drove tangible business results.

When you champion Experience Level Agreements (XLAs), you move past outdated metrics to measure what truly matters—how people feel and perform.

After a corporate separation, a global client rebuilt both IT and culture from scratch. By embracing XLAs, they focused on enhancing the direct employee experience, creating a resilient IT environment, and a vibrant, collaborative culture. The outcome? Measurable gains in productivity and reduced costs.

This case proves that a people-centric approach doesn't just support business transformation, it accelerates it. When you put experience first, you unlock genuine value and lasting success.

Connected Experience

A ground breaking client case study following the XLA journey of a renowned global technology company known for household appliances. 

The session explores how, with Unisys, the organization shifted from traditional service metrics to XLAs, transforming employee experience. Attendees will learn how digital workplace solutions and XLA expertise delivered measurable improvements in satisfaction, productivity, and business outcomes. The presentation will detail practical steps, real challenges, and the substantial impact of a holistic, data-driven experience management strategy in today's workplace.

XLA success is not Hot Air

In his upcoming presentation, "From the Peaks to the Slopes," Dr. Fairbanks will guide the audience through the evolving landscape of employee experience management in large organizations, using Gartner's hype cycle as a powerful metaphor. He will begin by revisiting Gartner's 2021 assessment, which placed Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations.

NBCUniversal has several brands and divisions that are deeply involved in experience design and management. This focus is core to its physical and digital ventures.

Dr. Fairbanks will explain that the field is now entering the "Slope of Enlightenment," a phase where organizations are moving beyond hype and beginning to professionalize employee experience management. Central to Dr. Fairbanks' message is the assertion that experience management is now a critical competence for every senior executive. He will argue that, in today's complex and rapidly changing business environment, the ability to shape and optimize employee experience is essential for driving engagement, productivity, and business performance.

Dr. Fairbanks will emphasize that as organizations move "from the peaks to the slopes," those that invest in the professionalization of employee experience management will be best positioned to realize sustainable value and competitive advantage in the years ahead. 


In summary, Dr. Fairbanks' presentation will chart the journey of employee experience management from the heights of inflated expectations to the practical, evidence-based practices of the slope of enlightenment, making a compelling case for why every senior executive must master this critical organizational competence.

From the Peaks to the Slopes

As organisations adopt experience data to optimise and enhance IT services, one critical question remains: how do we ensure the experience data truly improves the employee experience?
In this webinar, Sakari Kyrö from HappySignals explores how experience data—real feedback from end-users—can be used for better IT decisions. By aligning AI behaviour with what users actually experience and expect, organisations can avoid common pitfalls of automation and build systems that drive satisfaction, reduce friction, and deliver real value.
Join us to discover how bringing human experience into ITSM leads to better outcomes in day-to-day operations—from faster resolutions and fewer escalations to higher employee satisfaction and trust in digital services.

Top 3 Use Cases for using experience data in ITSM

HappySignals

IT Experience Management

Employee Satisfaction

Human centered IT Experience

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Top 3 Use Cases for using experience data in ITSM

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Service Desk Institute (SDI)