From 2 a.m. emergencies to proactive fixes: AI transforms application management
November 13, 2025 / Drew Gregory
Short on time? Read the key takeaways
- Application issues that take hours to resolve can now be identified and fixed in minutes with AI.
- AI acts like a memory bank for your IT team, instantly recalling solutions that worked for similar problems.
- Automated documentation means each problem becomes easier to solve the next time it occurs.
- IT teams can shift from constant firefighting to building new capabilities that drive business value.
It’s 2 a.m. Your customer portal crashes. Again. Your IT team scrambles to investigate, spending precious hours — recreating solutions they’ve built before if they remember them.
Application management has traditionally required a heavy-staffing model to maintain business operations, identify issues impacting the environment and apply the appropriate resolutions. However, this reactive approach drains resources and frustrates everyone involved. AI is changing this dynamic by helping applications predict their own problems and resolve them before users are affected.
The application management challenge
Every organization faces the same pattern when applications break down:
Someone has to notice there's a problem — often, after users start complaining. Then teams must figure out what's wrong, dig through old tickets or documentation to see if this happened before, apply a fix, test it and document the solution for next time.
Each step requires human attention, turning what could be quick fixes into time-consuming investigations. Meanwhile, applications stay broken and users stay frustrated.
Many organizations turn to application managed services — outsourcing the ongoing care and maintenance of their business applications — to handle this challenge, but traditional approaches still rely heavily on manual processes. Teams spend more time putting out fires than building new capabilities.
AI changes the game
Artificial intelligence transforms this manually intensive and reactive cycle into proactive problem-solving. Instead of waiting for issues to surface, AI continuously monitors application health and connects current symptoms with historical knowledge.
Think of AI as a smoke detector for your applications, but one that also remembers every fire that's been extinguished and how to prevent similar ones.
Spotting problems before they impact users
Modern AI goes beyond creating support tickets after problems occur. It analyzes patterns across your entire application environment, comparing current performance with historical data.
When a server shows early signs of memory stress, AI recognizes the pattern from previous incidents. It can predict that without intervention, applications will slow down within hours and suggest the memory optimization that resolved similar issues before.
This predictive approach catches problems while they're manageable, keeping applications running smoothly and users happy.
Fixing problems faster with institutional memory
When issues do occur, AI taps into your organization's complete support history. Those knowledge articles and repositories, technical diagrams and resolution notes that used to require manual searching? AI scans through everything in seconds to identify the most relevant solutions.
AI can even route complex issues directly to team members with the right expertise, eliminating the usual chain of escalations. For routine problems with known solutions, AI can apply tested fixes automatically and close tickets without human intervention.
Your team spends less time recreating solutions and more time on strategic work.
Learning from every resolution
When you hear application documentation, you may first think of the importance of accurate, complete software documentation accessible in technical manuals, online or both. And while AI can assist with software documentation, it can also be used to document incident resolution.
Documentation often gets shortchanged when teams are rushing to fix problems. AI changes this by automatically capturing what happened, what worked and what didn't. These detailed histories become part of your knowledge base, making future similar issues even faster to resolve. Each problem becomes an opportunity for your systems to get smarter.
From firefighting to innovation
Organizations implementing AI-powered application managed services create a positive cycle: better problem prediction leads to faster resolution. That creates better documentation, which improves future predictions.
Your IT team transforms from reactive firefighters to proactive innovators. Applications run more reliably, users experience fewer disruptions and the business can count on its technology to support growth rather than create obstacles.
Considering this approach for your organization? Learn how Unisys can help you implement application managed services that leverage AI to build more intelligent, resilient application management.
