The 101 on AI-powered IT: the answers you’ve been looking for

If you’re looking to gain a better understanding of what Atera’s AI-powered IT can do for you, we’ve got you covered.

At our recent AI-powered IT virtual event, Atera co-founders Gil Pekelman and Oshri Moyal sat down and answered some great questions from the audience about the different capabilities enabled by our end-to-end AI integration, Atera’s plans for the future, and more.

We’ve collected the most frequently asked questions to provide you here with the answers, straight from the source.

Can you provide some examples of how the Atera platform improved IT operations in real-world scenarios?

In the past year or so, everyone’s been talking about AI and the impact it’s going to have on the economy and the labor market, but a lot of these conversations have remained very high-level. How exactly AI will transform our work is still very much an open question. 

Atera is currently being used by over 23,000 IT professionals for their daily operations, managing some 4.2 million devices between them. Since our integration with Microsoft and OpenAI, our data has been revealing some of the amazing results that can be achieved with our AI-powered IT platform—such as a 99% reduction in response time, a 95% reduction in resolution time, and as much as 10X more tickets resolved per technician in the same amount of time.

These capabilities are divided into two tenants:

• End-user facing: Allows end-users to self-troubleshoot the most common IT issues, including password resets and computer reboots, email issues, etc.
• Our AI assistant: Provides additional “brainpower” to IT teams for more complex problem-solving such as AI-generated scripting, solutions and responses, user sentiment analysis, SNMP configurations, and more.

So, the individual impact really depends on how users choose to leverage our AI. For example, Joseph Smith, technical support engineer at AFP Technology, said they use it to create scripts, automate tasks, and troubleshoot errors fast and efficiently—meaning the main impact they’re seeing is on productivity and performance. 

Derek Daly, technical service manager at DataSol, is using our object identifier (OID) generator to cut a frustrating process that can take hours—searching for the correct device identifier on the manufacturer’s website—to a few seconds.

You can also read our customer stories with SWNS Media Group and Fuse Technology Group to learn how AIT has changed the way they work.

Is Atera using my data to help train its AI algorithm?

So, one of the main concerns around using public AI tools is that proprietary data is being used to train the various AI models used in these tools. A related concern is that this information could‌ also become publicly available in other ways.

Atera integrates Azure OpenAI, meaning nothing transfers to OpenAI but rather everything is confined to the Atera platform. Your inputs (prompts), outputs, and embeddings are not accessible to either the OpenAI environment or to other customers, and are not used to train other models, either. 

You can find the full list of Atera’s compliances on our website.

Do we have control over what is determined to be an auto-pilot issue, versus a co-pilot issue/ticket? It feels like there is a threshold, but what determines it?

Regarding Atera’s AIT, auto-pilot refers to what the AI does autonomously, while co-pilot refers to situations where the AI acts as an “assistant” to the technician, for example by offering suggestions. 

Atera’s auto-pilot currently has over 500 checks and solutions it can run on its own, and we’re constantly adding more. We focus on the most common scenarios and carefully add only risk-free actions. 

What happens if the AI encounters something it doesn’t know how to solve? We’ve added a cutting-edge escalation mechanism. When the AI identifies an action that is outside its boundaries, it will escalate it to a human technician, thereby moving it from auto-pilot to co-pilot. The human technician will then be aided by the AI with auto-ticket summaries, suggested solutions and responses, and more.

Can AIT be used to build ticket automation rules?

AIT can be used to automate a lot of things—it’s really only limited by your imagination. For example, the ticketing engine already uses the AI to auto-tag tickets, so you can create all kinds of automations based on these tags.

One of the most common automations we see that leverages this auto-tagging mechanism is dispatching. Say you have a technician who specializes in a specific hardware or device. You can automate the dispatch of all tickets with the relevant tag to this specific technician. Or you can do this for all tickets and automate all of your dispatching, eliminating manual dispatching completely. You can even take this a step further by then automating auto-healing and script deployment for specific issues.

Is there a way to push out software installs and updates through the AI autopilot?

Absolutely! As every technician knows, installing and updating software—whether for existing users or when onboarding new employees or end users—is a very frequent ask. And it’s quite time-consuming. 

With Atera, that task falls under ‌auto-pilot. So technicians can configure the list of allowed software once—Zoom, browsers, the Office suite, etc.—and the autopilot will pull from this list, and take care of all installs and updates on its own. Only if it runs into a request that is not in the allowed list, or there’s an issue with permissions or something similar, it will escalate to the technician. And of course, the technician will get the ticket with all this information included. 

What languages can people interact with Atera’s AI?

Atera’s autopilot can support all languages, so please—give it a try in your native language!

Our co-pilot can understand all languages—meaning you can input your requests in any language of your choice. However, all output will be in the language defined for the user’s system. We currently support English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish.

Are we able to customize answers from the AI to customers?

One of the features enabled by the Atera co-pilot is AI-generated replies. These are generated based on the ticket summary, the various actions taken, etc. Of course, they are completely editable, or you can choose not to use them at all. 

We are a mixed windows(50%), Linux(10%) and MacOS(40%) house. is Atera and AIT relevant to our business?

Atera seamlessly backs up Windows, Linux, and OS X platforms (as well as Microsoft Exchange, Hyper-V, SharePoint, SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and VMware). You can find more information by browsing our Knowledge Base.

So yes, if you are looking for an IT management solution that offers a single-pane-of-glass, features like RMM, helpdesk, analytics and reporting, as well as a seamless, easy way to integrate AI capabilities into your workflow, Atera and AIT are relevant to your business.

Where is Atera going with AI, and what’s your vision for IT for the next few years?

Atera’s AIT, OpenAI, and tools like ChatGPT, they’re all built on a combination of three things—software that “thinks” in a way similar to human intelligence, endless computing power, and endless data. Together, the combination creates human-like reasoning. In many ways, we’re only at the beginning of this revolution.

The way we at Atera see the future of IT, the “small things” will be taken care of by AI. All the routine, mundane tasks that take up the majority of time and cause a lot of frustration—password resets, maintenance updates, patching, etc. 

And what IT people will be doing is focusing on more complex, impactful work. So, security, scaling, architecture, sitting with customers and with the organization, understanding what the real business needs are, and building around that.

And the impact on businesses is going to be in two avenues: First, IT professionals are just going to be much more efficient. But on the entire organizational level, there will be less frequent problems because they’re going to be solved ahead of time. There’ll be less waiting time for issues to be fixed. Security will be better, etc. So that efficiency is really going to translate to the whole organization.

As to where Atera is going with our AIT—Things are happening very fast, and we’re releasing new features all the time. So we can’t reveal everything just yet, but stay tuned, we are working on some amazing innovations, and you can keep up with them on our community and our social media channels, and of course via product updates if you’re already Atera users.