Helix Agentic AI
BMC Helix Agentic AI is a large scale project my team took on in 2024, at the request of our VP for Product Management. At the time, the space was visibly on the cusp of a number of shifts; the traditional way of working is changing by GenAI, budget allocations were moving away from personnel towards integrating AI to change the way service desk and agents operated.
I was asked to lead the work for AI Agent Studio for Helix Applications, a comprehensive platform for creating, extending, deploying, and managing AI agents and agent teams across the enterprise.
Rapidly design and experiment with creating your own automation agents, personal assistants, and edge AI systems in an interactive sandbox for connecting multimodal LLMs, speech and vision transformers, vector databases, prompt templating, and function calling to live sensors and I/O. Optimized for deployment onboard Jetson with on-device compute, low-latency streaming, and unified memory.
My role:
Work as part of a cross-functional leadership team, and be primarily in charge of initial strategy, design execution, and planning across the division.
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What were we solving for
As the landscape of AI is evolving, AI agents are meant to drive exponential productivity across the business.
To stay ahead of competition and solve essential business challenges, the UX team was brought in to help, not only make sense of these changes, but to also outline the strategies that would enable BMC to get ahead of them. The team was also on the hook to meet tangible milestones, including delivery of "Agentic AI" across all DSOM applications in 2024, Agent Studio in Feb 2025, as well as tactical roadmaps for each product area to commit as we evolve the concept into 2025.
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Research questions
How does the service management organization, including its products, offerings, and services need to shift in order to meet the current changing environment within IT service management?
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What does the evolution path from here look like in order to meet these necessary changes?
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How does this evolve as we get from one year out, to two, to five?
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What does the action plan look like to get us from one of the milestones above to the next?
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The work
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Foundation (3 weeks)
The team segmented the work into four discreet stages, each focused on specific outcomes and deliverables meant to drive the project forward quickly, and allow for tangible outcomes where possible.
The first step was out foundation stage, and consisted largely of gathering insights from internal leadership, customer success, industry analysts, and past projects.
The outcomes of these activities provided the team with a strong baseline of knowledge to move forward from, while also exposing gaps that the team would need to fill in our next stage of work.
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​FOUNDATION
Set focus, areas of investigation and scope on the most important customer problems. Plan discovery work.
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1 Month
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KEY DECISIONS
1. The right customers and use cases.
2. Focus and areas of investigation
3. Customers participating in project
4. Customers' roles/employees to observe
5. Scope of capabilities and POC's
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ACTIVITIES
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Find out what we already know
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Review research reports, data and other materials including business assessments
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Internal interviews with Product Managers & Customer Success team members (N=5) to get their perspective and customer contacts
The project's foundational phase relied on internal and customer knowledge gathering and a lot of future activity planning.
​Discovery (5 weeks)
The second stage of work was about filling in gaps, and checking back on the information we received in the foundation stage. This stage consisted of a couple of different research activities. I led a series of interviews to discuss expectations with IT and service desk employees. Then, key learnings were translated into vision statements for each area of inquiry; customers, their workers, technology, and organizations. The outputs from this stage were leveraged as direct inputs into business direction planning, and the design concepting work that would be the focus of the next stage.
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​DISCOVERY
Deep dive into business priorities, customer needs and agents work practices.
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2 Month
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KEY DECISIONS
1. Prioritize opportunity areas
2. Business needs to solve
3. Process owner and Agent needs to solve
4. Design principles to guide solutions
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ACTIVITIES
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Business process modeling - discover business objectives, workflows & processes
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Interviews and observation with ~4 customers
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~3-5 leaders: Business goals & process improvements
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Interview BU & IT leaders on objectives, current & future state
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~25 Process owners & Agents: most relevant job roles
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Observe process owners and agents - discover needs
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Define opportunity areas, generate solution ideas & design principals
DELIVERABLES
1. Business process models
2. Process owner work models
3. Pain point & need statements
4. Feature ideas
5. Opportunity themes
6. Design principals
The discovery phase took the learnings from foundation & extended them beyond our internal sphere of our Knowledge. During this phase, we looked to test some of our assumptions, dive deeper into the factors driving certain trends, and developed a grounded future product strategy.
​Discovery (5 weeks)
The second stage of work was about filling in gaps, and checking back on the information we received in the foundation stage. This stage consisted of a couple of different research activities. I led a series of interviews to discuss expectations with IT and service desk employees. Then, key learnings were translated into vision statements for each area of inquiry; customers, their workers, technology, and organizations. The outputs from this stage were leveraged as direct inputs into business direction planning, and the design concepting work that would be the focus of the next stage.
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