A CIO's Guide to the Splunk AI Toolkit: Shifting IT from Reactive to Predictive

The Imperative for AI in IT

IT organizations from ITOps and DevOps to SecOps and NetOps—have been caught in a reactive loop. They chase incidents and outages, trying to restore services before users or customers notice, costing enterprises millions of dollars in unplanned outages.

Current IT Approaches Aren’t Sustainable

But that approach is no longer sustainable. Why?

• Despite heavy investment, there are still too many incidents and outages.
• IT environments are more dynamic and complex than ever. Executives and leaders expect resilience, while customers and employees demand 24x7x365 uptime. This increases the pressure during real-time troubleshooting.
• The rapid deployment of generative and agentic AI systems is introducing new, unpredictable behaviors—the dreaded “unknown unknowns.”
• The volume of IT operational data is exploding, amplified by hyperscale and AI-driven applications.

The Need for Digital Resilience Has Never Been Higher

Maintaining reliable and highly performant systems isn’t easy when your digital systems are complex. The cost of unplanned downtime continues to rise, not just in dollars, but in reputation and lost trust. Performance degradation is also costly, leading to frustrated users and app abandonment.

Current toolsets and workflows, even semi-automated ones, can’t scale to match the speed of hyperscale AI systems. The solution is clear—to meet this moment, IT needs AI.

CIOs Face Six Top Challenges

IT teams face five persistent challenges:

• Reactive posture: IT operations are stuck chasing incidents after the damage is done.
• Data overload: Teams are collecting more data than they can handle. The raw operational data is often unclean, unstructured, and even unusable.
• Data silos: Operational data is very siloed. Many teams make copies of this data which, as a subset, becomes stale over time—leading to unreliable insights.
• Blind spots: At the same time, teams still struggle with blind spots. Whether this is due to data siloes, filtering, or disparate tools, you can’t get insights into what you can’t see.
• More "unknown unknowns": New complex failures emerge as AI systems interact with distributed architectures.

The bottom line: these challenges can’t be solved without AI help.

Data Is the Foundation

Even the most advanced AI can’t deliver insights without the right data. One of the biggest challenges enterprises face is obtaining the quality and quantity of data to effectively diagnose and prevent incidents.

To achieve digital resilience, you need complete horizontal and vertical visibility across all of your environments: network, infrastructure, servers, databases, APIs, and application-level data. And it needs to be clean and AI ready.

The Splunk AI Toolkit Value Proposition

The AI Toolkit is a foundational builder's toolkit that empowers your enterprise to shift from reactive firefighting to proactive, intelligent operations. The AI Toolkit is a builder’s platform, empowering every user—from no-code to pro-code—to detect, explain, and automate.

All solutions connect to external data sources and runtimes through MCP1 server and endpoint integrations, ensuring that data remains where it belongs and is secure and governed.”

1. Proactive & Predictive Operations (ported over from the original MLTK)

The Toolkit enables you to build and deploy models that ensure superior uptime and security:

• Predict Incidents: Build custom, advanced AI and machine learning predictive models to forecast demand, detect anomalies, and predict outages or security incidents before they occur.
• Uncover the Unseen: F ind the "Unknown Unknowns" buried deep within your logs.
• Fix Across the Stack: Manage custom AI and ML models to help you build custom agents that can reason, gain insights, and execute actions to fix issues across your entire federated tech stack, from infrastructure to the application level.

2. AI Democratization and Efficiency

The platform dramatically improves productivity across all user profiles:

• Empower Every Users: AI Toolkit democratizes machine learning and AI for the vast Splunk user base, bringing powerful AI/ML capabilities into the familiar search interface. The AI Toolkit is a builder’s platform that empowers every user—from no‑code to pro‑code—to detect, explain, and automate, enabling them to create custom AI solutions that reason over Splunk data and act across their federated enterprise stack.
• Flexible Agent Building: Use intuitive no-code tools for rapid prototyping or full-code environments for custom enterprise-grade development.
• Simplify Complex Data: Use generative AI to translate complex event data into actionable summaries and reports.

3. Enterprise-Grade Architecture and Trust

The AI Toolkit is built for the demanding requirements of a large enterprise:

• Security and Governance: All AI innovations are delivered within the secure, governed, and enterprise-grade Splunk environment you already rely on.

• Scale and Performance: The new toolkit elevates performance by using GPUs and parallel model processing, removing limitations associated with large datasets and executing models at enterprise scale.

• Model Flexibility (LLMs): You get unparalleled flexibility for grounding your AI insights:

  • Splunk Hosted Models: Use vetted, tested, and secure models like GPT OSS and Llama 3.1 variants for event summarization and natural language explanation.
  • Third-Party and BYOM: Integrate with third-party LLMs or use the BYOM (Bring Your Own Model) option for ultimate customization based on your enterprise's unique needs.
  • Add RAG integrations to ground generative outputs in enterprise knowledge, reducing hallucinations and improving accuracy.

Bring AI to the Data—Not the Other Way Around

When it comes to running AI for IT, one of Splunk’s unique advantages is data management. Splunk AI Toolkit brings AI to the data, solving the massive data mobility problem. Instead of moving massive data sets across networks to reach AI systems—an approach that’s costly, time-consuming, and risky—Splunk AI Toolkit brings AI to the data.

This architecture drastically reduces latency and costs while enabling real-time insight, faster decision-making, and stronger governance. It’s how Splunk delivers digital resilience at enterprise scale.

The Future of Digital Resilience

As IT complexity grows and systems become more autonomous, predictive intelligence will define the next generation of digital resilience.

The Splunk AI Toolkit helps organizations move beyond firefighting, empowering IT teams to predict and prevent incidents before they impact users—and to do so with speed and confidence at scale.

In an era where every second counts, predictive operations are not just a competitive advantage. They’re a survival strategy.

Explore the Splunk AI Toolkit.