DXC Adds Agentic AI To Managed Services With DXC Oasis

‘Everybody’s talking about all the things you could do with agentic AI. This is what Oasis is really about: how to use AI to run the business of running IT better. Oasis is our personification of that,’ says Chris Drumgoole, DXC’s president of global infrastructure services.

Global IT solution provider DXC Technology Wednesday unveiled DXC Oasis, the company’s new intelligent orchestration model for its managed services business that combines human expertise with agentic AI.

DXC Oasis combines everything DXC, ranked No. 14 on CRN’s 2025 Solution Provider 500, has learned over the last 60 years with the latest in AI, said Chris Drumgoole, president of global infrastructure services for the Ashburn, Va.-based company.

“We think the services business is transforming dramatically and that the world needs a new platform to be able to bring the full value of agentic in order to run IT,” Drumgoole told CRN. “Everybody’s talking about all the things you could do with agentic AI. This is what Oasis is really about: how to use AI to run the business of running IT better. Oasis is our personification of that.”

In practical terms, DXC Oasis is a dashboard, a tool and an open platform, Drumgoole said.

“You log in, you can see servers, you can execute AI actions, you can get recommendations,” he said. “But in reality, it’s the platform on which we’re transforming the managed services business.”

DXC Oasis has a focus on automation and is theoretically capable of full automation, Drumgoole said. However, he said, that actual design criteria is around giving a human operator an army of agentic agents in order to be way more powerful, he said.

“If you’re a Linux admin, you’re sitting there, an event fires, and instead of opening all the traditional ITSM stuff, Oasis takes it, triages it, and applies first of all a Linux agent against it,” he said. “Then it applies a governance agent, a security agent, checks all those things, and comes back to you as an educated human and says, ‘Hey, here’s the recommendation. Here’s what we think happened. Here’s three or four options, scored green, yellow and red around risk. Do you want to take one of these options or another to resolve the problem?’ You click ‘yes.’ It goes out and does it for you. So it’s really the combination of human and agentic that’s actually really the value of Oasis.”

At this point in AI development, it is really important to keep humans in the loop, Drumgoole said.

“I mentioned our 60 years of experience,” he said. “I don’t mean to sound flippant, but anyone can say, ‘Claude, diagnose this or ChatGPT or whatever, diagnose this Linux code.’ I could literally go online and do that. Today, we’ve trained the Oasis agents with 60 years of runbooks based on lived experience, of knowing how what happened to this customer might affect that customer. And the human is the last piece of that. So is there a path to fully automated operations? Yes, I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t. Absolutely there is. Could Oasis support it? Absolutely. But for the time being, we think having the educated human and the history and context is really important.”

DXC Oasis has a framework for generating new AI agents on the fly for any platform, Drumgoole said.

“Oasis was built open from day one, so it works on top of anyone else’s platform,” he said. “It works on top of anyone else’s tooling. And a big part of that was, if you don’t like our agents and you want to write your own, or you want to customize, or you want to augment our agents, have at it. Customers still benefit from our governance framework and all the controls. You can write your own agent and still have our compliance and security agents review its work.”

Drumgoole declined to discuss whether the deployment of DXC Oasis might lead to a drop in employment of human workers, but he did cite DXC’s own experience so far.

“We’re months already into deployment in the security operation centers of our agentic, and given the volumes in that space, yes, it has changed the jobs,” he said. “But if you go to our website right now, you will see postings for security people. We need more and more of them. It definitely changes jobs. No question. But I don’t have a crystal ball to tell you what happens in the long run.”

The big change in jobs is that someone who is just a technical expert becomes an orchestrator and administrator of an army of technical agents, Drumgoole said.

“It is forcing a higher level, or ‘higher’ is the wrong word, a ‘different’ level of technical thinking,” he said. “It’s almost like your bionic super suit, right? You now have more power than you ever thought you had. So the way you do certain tasks, you have to think differently. It’s not just about, ‘Hey, how do I write this script?’ It’s, ‘How do I actually coordinate these 300 agents to execute this script, to take a widespread action?’ It forces more bigger problem-thinking and less direct individual problem- solving.”

Drumgoole acknowledged that many applications and other platforms already have agentic AI capabilities but said that does not take away from what DXC Oasis offers.

“The real nuance of Oasis is it’s a combination of about two years’ worth of work, but we built it post-AI,” he said. “LLMs existed from the very day we were inspired to build Oasis. Oasis is different from a software platform on which someone added AI. It’s a true AI platform. So could you customize your own software to the extent that it looks and kind of feels like Oasis does? Probably. But anyone else out of the box? We think it’s really unmatched.”

DXC Oasis works with agentic platforms from other platforms customers already use, Drumgoole said.

“We really wanted to be very cautious of our customers’ existing investments, existing relationships,” he said. “We think that not locking a customer into our platform in an AI world is even more important than it’s ever been.”

DXC Oasis is generally available now. DXC includes the base version as part of its managed services at no extra charge, Drumgoole said.

“Part of the reason we made Oasis is to make our customer experience better,” he said. “So the base level of Oasis, the base automation, is actually included as part of being a DXC customer. If you want to do some specific agent stuff past that, there’s usage and subscription plans available. And if you want to work on stuff that’s not managed by DXC, we also have baseline subscriptions and usage base. The best way to think about it is, it’s not a per-seat issue. It’s more of a usage-based model with different packages on the usage.”

The speed at which business is changing is just too high to not bring humans and AI agents together, Drumgoole said.

“In our industry, you’re either going to embrace that, or you’re going to relegate yourself to a slow decline over the years,” he said. “And Oasis is our place to integrate that. The days of, ‘Well, I’ll just give you 300 FTEs [full-time equivalent employees] at X dollars an hour, and they’re Windows admins,’ that just doesn’t scale. And that doesn’t operate at machine speed, which is the way the world is going. Think about Anthropic’s Mythos coming out with security. That model, you can throw as many bodies as you want at it and you’re never going to keep up. You have to change the fundamental model. And that’s really why we built Oasis.”