ITSM Migration: Why Customers Are Moving On From Legacy Tools

Most IT teams don’t plan for an IT service management (ITSM) migration until they’re stuck. The system feels slow. Tickets take too long to resolve. And making small changes? It becomes a project in itself. What’s meant to make work easier ends up adding more of it. At some point, you stop asking “if” and start asking “when.”

That’s why so many teams are rethinking their ITSM setup. Legacy tools promised control, but what you got was complexity. Instead of helping IT teams move faster, they slow you down with rigid processes and endless maintenance. If you’ve been wondering whether it’s time to make a switch, you’re not alone. In this post, we’ll explore why customers are moving on from legacy tools, what migration really involves, and how you can make the shift.

Many businesses hesitate to move away from their old ITSM platforms. The cost of integration and customization feels too high. But here’s the catch: staying on these legacy systems is far more expensive. Here’s a closer look at why traditional ITSM tools are falling short:

Many legacy ITSM platforms have grown quite difficult to use. Setting them up and navigating them is confusing for admins, and employees just want a simple way to get help. This complexity slows adoption and forces your IT team to spend more time managing the tool than actually helping people. Even small tasks feel like a chore, leading to a loss of productivity as employees spend valuable time on tedious, repetitive work.

Traditional tools struggle to connect IT with other parts of the business. Development teams, HR, and other departments often work in isolation. Employees who spend their day in collaboration hubs constantly have to switch tools just to log a support ticket. This fragmented experience wastes time and slows down the flow of information needed to solve problems quickly.

Reporting an issue is still a slow, manual process. An IT analyst has to categorize the ticket, decide its priority, search through knowledge bases, identify the right experts, and perform root-cause analysis. Most legacy tools don’t have artificial intelligence (AI) to help with these steps. They can’t suggest solutions based on past incidents or speed up collaboration. Your team ends up stuck doing repetitive work instead of focusing on higher-value tasks.

Traditional ITSM is built to respond to problems after they happen. Logging incidents, managing changes, and resolving disruptions is all reactive. These systems rarely prevent issues because they lack AI-driven predictive capabilities. Without proactive insights, your team spends most of their time fixing problems instead of preventing them. In today’s business world, this approach is no longer sustainable.

Powerful technological and business trends are reshaping IT and creating a real sense of urgency to modernize service delivery. One of the biggest factors is the AI revolution. Generative AI (Gen AI) has changed what we expect from technology. We now want intelligent, conversational, and assistive experiences in every part of our work. This has led to an agent-first ITSM approach where AI agents work alongside human teams to deliver support. They can understand user intent, automate routine tasks, analyze complex problems, and suggest solutions. They help scale the capacity and productivity of the entire IT organization.

Another key factor is the employee experience imperative. A good employee experience is no longer optional. Navigating confusing portals or switching between apps just to get IT help wastes time and frustrates employees. The modern approach delivers support directly in the flow of work, meeting employees where they already are. This seamless experience has become a core part of building a productive digital workplace.

Finally, businesses are recognizing the need for a unified platform. IT has often been managed in systems separate from the rest of the business, which disconnects IT operations from business outcomes. Companies now want a single platform that unifies IT and business data. A unified system provides a single source of truth and allows businesses to build flexible processes that can evolve with their needs.

If you're wondering whether you’re ready to make the shift, take a moment to evaluate your current system. A modern ITSM platform should boost efficiency and improve employee experience. If your current tool feels like a roadblock, it might be time to consider a change.

Consider the following questions:

• Is your current system too complex and frustrating for employees and IT staff?
• Do your teams have to constantly switch between apps to report issues or collaborate on fixes?
• Is your IT team buried in repetitive, manual tasks instead of focusing on strategic initiatives?
• Does your system lack the built-in AI to proactively identify issues and suggest solutions?
• Is your ITSM solution isolated from the rest of your business applications and data?

If you answered "yes" to one or more of these questions, it’s a clear sign that your legacy tool is holding you back. It's time to stop investing in an outdated system and start exploring a modern, agent-first platform built for the future of work.

Migrating your ITSM platform can feel like a massive task. But if you approach it in clear phases, it becomes much easier. Following a structured path lets you get early wins and unlock value faster. Here are the eight steps to guide your migration journey.

Look at your tools and workflows. Find out where the bottlenecks are. Talk to IT agents, team leads, and all involved employees. Ask what frustrates them and what works well. Use these insights to define what success looks like for your migration. Are you aiming to resolve tickets faster, improve employee experience, reduce operational costs, or all of these? Having a clear picture of the future makes every next step more purposeful.

ITSM migration isn’t just an IT project. You need support from leaders across the business. Create a business case that clearly shows the benefits and expected return on investment (ROI). Build a cross-functional migration team of 6 to 10 people, including IT, key departments, and an executive sponsor. This team keeps the project aligned with business goals and provides everyone with the resources and authority to act.

Choosing a new ITSM platform is more than a feature comparison. Look for flexibility, ease of use, and built-in automation and AI capabilities. Your vendor should also be a strategic partner who can support your journey long-term. The goal is to select a solution that solves today’s challenges and scales with your business needs.

Avoid a big-bang approach where you try to migrate everything at once. Instead, start with core, high-impact processes like incident management and request fulfillment. This allows your team to deliver early results and adjust based on lessons learned. Later phases can then introduce more advanced capabilities like problem management, change management, and a configuration management database (CMDB). A phased rollout reduces risk and helps everyone adjust gradually.

Your new ITSM system is only as good as the data you bring into it. Review all existing data, including knowledge articles, user information, and asset details. Archive outdated items and standardize data formats. Make sure only relevant and accurate information is migrated. This will help your new platform start with a clean slate and provide reliable information from day one.

Migration is a chance to rethink workflows. Don’t just replicate old processes. Simplify steps and remove unnecessary tasks. Use automation wherever possible. Design processes that are intuitive for employees and cut manual work for IT teams.

A successful launch depends on user adoption. Develop a comprehensive training plan for both your IT teams, and your end-users. For IT analysts, focus on the new workflows and capabilities. For employees, focus on how to easily request help in the new system. Communicate openly and frequently about the upcoming changes. Highlight the benefits to build excitement and facilitate a smooth transition.

After your phased go-live, the journey isn't over. Collect user feedback to see what works and where improvements are needed. Iterate on configurations and workflows based on real-world usage. A modern ITSM platform is designed to evolve with your business, so use these insights to continuously improve service delivery.

Salesforce Agentforce IT Service is built to run all your IT services in one place. Its goal is to change how IT service management works by helping you scale your workforce with AI agents. It’s built on Customer 360 and Data 360, with Agentforce powering the AI engine. It covers the full spectrum of IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) aligned processes, including service operations and service transitions, and it’s flexible enough to grow with whatever your business needs next.

Here’s what it does best.

Agentforce IT Service comes with everything IT teams expect from a modern ITSM platform. It’s powered by AI and designed for how people‌ work today. Here’s what that looks like:

Incident management: Employees can report issues via chat, email, phone, or a self-service portal in natural language. AI helps categorize the problem, link related assets, and suggest articles from your knowledge base. IT managers get clear dashboards to see performance and track the most important incidents.

Problem management: Recurring issues are identified automatically. AI helps run root-cause analysis (RCA), and temporary solutions are documented to help teams manage problems until a permanent fix is in place.

Change and release management: Every change and release is guided through assessment, approval, and implementation. A visual calendar helps avoid scheduling conflicts. Future integrations with tools like GitHub and JIRA will make it easier to connect development and operations.

Request management: Employees can request products or services, like a new laptop or onboarding package, from a single catalog. Approvals and workflows happen automatically. With conversational AI, employees can type what they need in chat and get it done without searching through forms.

Knowledge management: Articles appear automatically when someone’s working on a ticket. New articles can be created directly from incidents or problems. Integrations with SharePoint and Confluence bring external knowledge into the same view, so teams don’t have to switch between systems.

CMDB and asset discovery: The configuration management database (CMDB) is the single source of truth for IT assets. Agentforce IT Service keeps it updated with automated discovery, visual service maps, and dashboards that track data quality.

Analytics and insights: Prebuilt dashboards help leaders track performance. Advanced analytics with Tableau provide deeper insights. Predictive AI can highlight risks before they become bigger problems.

Most older tools just add AI features on top. Agentforce IT Service is different. It is built around Agentforce, a set of customizable, autonomous AI agents. This agent-first approach changes the way service is delivered. When an employee needs help, they can type in their issue in a chat. The agent understands what they mean, searches the knowledge base for a solution, and if needed, automatically creates a correctly categorized incident or service request.

For IT teams, the agent acts as a digital assistant, and handles time-consuming tasks. For example, when an incident is created, the Fulfiller Agent can find related incidents and affected assets, analyze the root cause, suggest a resolution based on past data, and even draft communications and summaries.

Agentforce IT Service also goes beyond user-triggered actions with proactive agents that anticipate needs. For instance, an agent can spot when a laptop is nearing warranty expiration, check compliance, get manager approval, and trigger an asset refresh — all without human involvement. This proactive approach helps prevent problems before they affect the business.

Legacy tools often force employees and IT teams to work in separate, isolated systems, which creates friction and wastes time. Agentforce IT Service is built to provide support directly in the flow of work.

With Slack integration, employees can request help, track tickets, and get approvals without leaving the application they use every day.

For more complex issues that need multiple experts, IT teams can start a swarm directly in Slack. This instantly creates a dedicated channel, brings in the right people based on their skills and availability, and provides all the context needed to solve the problem together. This approach reduces resolution time by eliminating slow, step-by-step handoffs.

Many organizations stay on legacy platforms because migrating feels long and complicated. Agentforce IT Service is designed to be simple to use and easy to set up. The experience is built for everyone, from employees reporting an issue to administrators configuring new workflows. This focus on ease of use drives adoption and helps teams stay productive.

The platform can be up and running quickly. This means you can have a fully configured ITSM solution ready to go, complete with prebuilt ITIL processes and sample data, from the moment you turn it on. What once took months now takes minutes, delivering value fast for businesses that can’t afford delays.

Agentforce IT Service runs on the unified Salesforce Platform, which connects IT with every other part of your business. This gives you a complete view of your IT, employee, and customer data. By breaking down the silos common in legacy systems, it enables true end-to-end automation across departments.

The platform is also built to be flexible and extensible. With a unified data model and low-code, or no-code tools, you can easily adjust and customize processes to meet your business’s changing needs. You aren’t locked into a rigid, outdated system. As your business grows, Agentforce IT Service grows with you, giving you a foundation that is ready for the future.

Every day stuck in legacy ITSM is a day of lost productivity and frustrated employees. Agentforce IT Service changes that. It brings AI agents directly into the flow of work and helps your IT team resolve issues faster and focus on the work that truly moves the business forward. The future of IT service management is already here. Make the switch to Agentforce IT Service and turn IT from a cost center into a growth engine for your organization.