All the Fives: Industry 5.0 and ITIL Version 5

# Industry Trends

# Leadership Insights

# Resilience

How ITIL Version 5's Experience module and its human-centric design philosophy connect to Industry 5.0 — and why the shift from SLAs to XLAs is more than a metrics update.

August 13, 2026

Robert Edward Pinnington

How ITIL Version 5's Experience module and its human-centric design philosophy connect to Industry 5.0 — and why the shift from SLAs to XLAs is more than a metrics update.

The Industrial Paradigm That Rewrites the Rules

Those of you who know me know I am keen on Complexity thinking and the various industrial phases we have been through. Look at my blogs on Alvin Toffler , a key thinker in the space, or my articles on David Snowden , Cynefin, and Estuarine mapping. The last iteration of industry, Industry 4.0, was about machines getting smarter. Automation, digitisation, the Internet of Things, AI — the organising ambition of the fourth industrial revolution was efficiency through technology. Processes optimised. Labour augmented or replaced. Decisions accelerated. The underlying logic was essentially economic: if a machine can do it faster and cheaper, that is progress.

Industry 5.0 asks a different question. Not 'how do we make technology more efficient?' but 'how do we make technology more human?' The shift, articulated clearly by the European Commission from 2021 onwards and now embedded in mainstream business strategy, repositions technology as a means to human and societal ends rather than an end in itself. The three pillars of Industry 5.0 are human-centricity, sustainability, and resilience. These are not soft values bolted onto an efficiency agenda — they are the agenda.

ITIL Version 5, launched in February 2026, is the first version of the framework explicitly designed for this paradigm. The language throughout is unmistakable: experience, human-centric design, sustainability embedded as a mandatory consideration rather than an optional add-on, value co-creation rather than value delivery. ITIL Version 5 is not simply a service management framework updated for AI and digital products. It is a service management framework rebuilt for an industrial era in which how technology makes people feel is as important as what technology does.

Industry 5.0 doesn't ask how fast we resolved the ticket. It asks how the person felt when the service failed and whether they trust us enough to stay.

What Industry 5.0 Actually Demands of Service Management

The practical implications of Industry 5.0 for ITSM are significant and, for organisations still operating primarily in a metrics-and-compliance mindset, somewhat uncomfortable. Three demands stand out.

Human-Centricity Means Measuring What Matters to People

Industry 4.0 service management was measured primarily in operational terms: uptime percentages, mean time to resolve, first contact resolution rates, ticket volumes. These metrics measure the efficiency of the service function. They do not measure the experience of the person using the service.

A system can maintain 99.9% availability and still deliver an unacceptable experience. As Ivo Umlenski, Cloud Availability Manager at IBM and beta tester for the ITIL Experience module, put it in a May 2026 article on itil.com: if a cloud service flickers for 30 seconds and the user loses trust, that erodes engagement — even if the SLA shows compliance. The service was technically available. The experience was not.

Industry 5.0 demands that this distinction be taken seriously, built into governance structures, and measured systematically. ITIL Version 5 provides the framework for doing exactly that.

Sustainability Is Non-Negotiable

In ITIL 4, sustainability was a consideration. In ITIL Version 5, it is mandatory. The framework embeds sustainability across service design, transformation planning, and governance decisions — from the energy consumption of infrastructure choices to the environmental impact of AI model training. This reflects the reality that ESG commitments now shape technology investment decisions at board level in most large organisations, and that service management frameworks that treat sustainability as someone else's problem are rapidly becoming irrelevant to the people who commission them.

Resilience Over Pure Efficiency

Industry 4.0's efficiency drive created lean, optimised systems that turned out to be fragile. Supply chains with no slack, IT architectures with no redundancy, service functions stripped to minimum headcount — all delivered impressive efficiency metrics right up until something unexpected happened. Industry 5.0's resilience pillar is in part a direct response to this: systems should be designed to absorb disruption, not merely to run cheaply when nothing goes wrong. ITIL Version 5 embeds resilience thinking throughout, most visibly in its treatment of availability management through an experience lens and in its Complexity Thinking model discussed in the preceding blog in this series .

Dimension	Industry 4.0 Approach	Industry 5.0 / ITIL V5 Approach
Primary measure	Efficiency and throughput	Human experience and value co-creation
Technology role	Automation and optimisation	Human augmentation and collaboration
Sustainability	Cost consideration	Mandatory design principle
Resilience	Efficiency-first; minimal redundancy	Resilience-first; absorb disruption
Success metric	SLA compliance	Experience Level Agreement (XLA) outcomes
Service design lens	Process and technology	People, outcomes, and experience journeys

ITIL Experience (Version 5): The Module That Changes the Conversation

Of the advanced modules in ITIL Version 5, the Experience module is arguably the most philosophically significant — and the most immediately relevant to the Industry 5.0 transition. Published in March 2026 and described by PeopleCert as focusing on 'human-centric design and experience management across the customer journey', it does something no previous ITIL module has done explicitly: it makes the emotional and cognitive response of service users a first-class concern of service management.

The module introduces what Umlenski describes as a powerful iterative loop built around three concepts: Noticing, Naming, and Navigating. These are not simply an alternative vocabulary for the familiar sense-respond cycle — they are a deliberate reorientation toward human perception as the primary signal in service management.

Noticing

Noticing is more than observation. It is attentive, interpretive awareness — being present to signals that traditional monitoring and reporting would miss entirely. A user who stops raising tickets is not necessarily a satisfied user. They may have given up. A team that consistently delivers within SLA but whose Net Promoter Score is declining is sending a signal that the metrics aren't capturing. The Experience module frames Noticing as a discipline: actively looking for what the numbers don't show, and creating the psychological safety for people to name what isn't working.

Naming

Naming is the act of giving language to experience — both the experience of service users and the internal experience of service teams. The module draws a direct connection between an organisation's ability to name experience problems clearly and its ability to act on them. Vague dissatisfaction — 'the service feels slow', 'I never know what's happening', 'it always seems to go wrong at the worst time' — is genuinely useful signal if it can be captured, categorised, and acted upon. The Experience module provides the conceptual tools to do this systematically rather than treating it as anecdote.

Navigating

Navigating is the governance and decision-making dimension of the loop — using what has been noticed and named to make better decisions about service design, improvement priorities, and investment. This is where the Experience module connects most directly to ITIL's broader practice framework: experience insights feed Continual Improvement, inform Service Design, and should drive the transition from SLA-based to XLA-based service agreements.

The ITIL Experience module makes a quietly radical case: that experience improvement depends on people feeling safe enough to name what isn't working. That is as much an organisational culture challenge as a service management one.

From SLAs to XLAs: The Metrics Revolution

Perhaps the most practically significant manifestation of ITIL Version 5's alignment with Industry 5.0 is the formal adoption of Experience Level Agreements alongside — and in some contexts instead of — traditional Service Level Agreements.

The distinction is fundamental. An SLA measures the performance of the service function: was the incident resolved within the agreed time? Was availability above the agreed threshold? These are backward-looking, output-focused measurements that tell you whether your processes ran correctly. They do not tell you whether the person on the other end of those processes had an experience worth having.

An XLA measures the experience of the service recipient: did they feel informed during the disruption? Did the resolution leave them confident, or anxious? Did the service enable them to do their job, or did it create friction? These are outcome-focused, forward-looking measurements that tell you whether the service is creating value in the way that matters most — to the human being using it.

Dimension	SLA (Service Level Agreement)	XLA (Experience Level Agreement)
What it measures	Service function performance	Service recipient experience
Primary signal	Operational metrics (MTTR, uptime, FCR)	Sentiment, satisfaction, trust, emotional impact
Time orientation	Backward-looking (did we comply?)	Forward-looking (are we creating value?)
Governance focus	Process compliance	Outcome co-creation
Failure signal	Breach of agreed threshold	Erosion of trust and engagement
Industry alignment	Industry 4.0 efficiency model	Industry 5.0 human-centric model

ITIL Version 5 does not propose abandoning SLAs. Operational metrics remain necessary — a service that feels wonderful but falls over every Tuesday morning is not actually serving its users well. The framework's position, reflected in the Experience module, is that SLAs and XLAs are complementary: SLAs ensure the operational foundation is sound; XLAs ensure that operational soundness translates into genuine value for the people the service exists to serve.

The AI Dimension: Human-Centricity Under Pressure

Any discussion of ITIL Version 5 and Industry 5.0 must acknowledge the tension that AI introduces into the human-centric agenda. AI-enabled services can process at speed, personalise at scale, and automate interactions that previously required human attention. These are genuine capabilities. They are also capable of creating profoundly inhuman experiences — impersonal, opaque, and difficult to challenge — if deployed without appropriate governance.

The ITIL Experience module addresses this tension directly. It is explicit, according to the itil.com documentation, about the governance required around AI in service contexts: decision boundaries, human handoff rules, documented AI Capability Model cards, and a maintained commitment to human-centricity throughout. The module's core argument — that AI delivers value only when people use it with confidence — is both a practical observation and an Industry 5.0 principle. Technology that erodes trust, however efficient, is not serving its purpose.

This connects to the AI Governance extension module in ITIL Version 5 and positions the Experience module as the human-centric counterpart to AI Governance's structural and ethical guidance. Between them, they provide ITSM professionals with the vocabulary and the governance structures to deploy AI in ways that augment human experience rather than diminishing it — which is precisely what Industry 5.0 requires.

What This Means for ITSM Professionals and Organisations

The convergence of ITIL Version 5 and Industry 5.0 has direct practical implications for how service management functions operate, how they are measured, and how they are led.

• Experience management is no longer optional. The Experience module makes it a core competency at Managing Professional level. Organisations that continue to manage services solely through operational metrics will find themselves misaligned with both the framework and the industrial paradigm their clients and customers are operating in.

• Sustainability must be built in, not bolted on. Service designers and architects need to factor environmental and operational sustainability into decisions from the outset, not retrospectively as a compliance exercise.

• XLAs require new measurement capabilities. Capturing sentiment, trust, and emotional response at scale requires different tools and different skills than traditional ITSM reporting. The transition from SLA to XLA governance is as much a cultural and capability challenge as a technical one.

• AI governance and human-centricity must travel together. The organisations most likely to navigate the AI transition well are those that implement AI capabilities and experience governance simultaneously, rather than deploying automation and then wondering why user satisfaction has declined.

• Leadership behaviours matter as much as frameworks. Industry 5.0's human-centric agenda ultimately depends on organisations where people feel safe enough to name problems, raise concerns about AI deployment, and advocate for the users they serve. No framework delivers that without the right culture.

ITIL Version 5 is not the complete answer to Industry 5.0. It is, however, the most practically useful service management framework yet produced for organisations trying to operate within it — human-centred, complexity-aware, AI-informed, and sustainability-committed. The Experience module is its most direct expression of what that actually means in daily practice: the conviction that a service which technically functions but fails the person using it has not, in any meaningful sense, succeeded at all.

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