Robin leading the way

AI’s promise has often outpaced its actual utility. For IT technicians, though, new agentic AI technology guarantees proven results.

IT teams have spent decades in a reactive posture and still exist mostly in firefighting mode. A constant stream of help desk tickets come in, IT technicians respond one by one, and they repeat that process every work day. The challenges have shifted for IT teams over time. Now, they grapple with legacy tools, technical debt, knowledge siloes, and abandoned projects, as well as continually changing tech trends and business needs. 

That’s a lot of friction for IT teams. It often wastes the skills and experience of IT teams, who solve the same few issues over and over again. And, an IT team only focused on firefighting means that end users across the business lose hours or days waiting for a fix. 

IT teams handling tickets manually also cost the enterprise money that isn’t going toward moving the business forward. Benchmarks show that a traditional manual tier 1 support ticket costs an enterprise between $22 and $100 each, when taking into account labor, tools, and management overhead.

And because humans can only handle one complex issue at a time, and with IT teams overloaded by repetitive tasks, labor takes up 70% to 80% of total service desk operating costs. So what’s the solution to bring IT teams out of firefighting mode and into more strategic, less repetitive roles within the enterprise?

The next phase of AI for IT teams

AI has brought the promise of time savings and productivity improvements for workers across industries. But it hasn’t always been clear what the bottom-line results are, or how the technology has contributed to meeting any business goals. And ensuring strict governance and guardrails for AI is essential for any enterprise.

Chatbots and self-service portals can defer or deflect tickets, such as providing static responses or suggested articles to users. A human technician eventually has to solve the issue. Or, an AI assistant lacks the necessary context and history to solve an issue, so the technician has to evaluate and fix any actions taken.

Building an autonomous teammate

But it’s now possible to integrate a digital teammate with the IT team, and even one that comes with performance guarantees. That’s a first for enterprise AI, with Robin by Atera being able to handle tickets end to end, anticipate issues, and actually free up IT teams’ time so they can focus on strategic work.

And the performance guarantees promise that Robin can independently resolve 50% of an enterprise’s tier 1 and complex tier 2 tickets within the first 90 days of onboarding — or the company will waive all fees. And, Atera guarantees a 72-hour proof of concept to bring Robin live into the enterprise environment to start resolving tickets autonomously.

The guarantees follow on to proven results: agentic AI tools like Robin have been shown to yield 11 to 13 hours per week reclaimed per technician. 

So how can Atera make these performance guarantees? There are three areas of leadership that have proven Robin’s effectiveness in solving real-world IT problems:

Autonomy

Other iterations of AI assistance for IT teams typically require human intervention or human solutions after tickets are deferred or deflected. Robin operates on a closed-loop system for true autonomy. It takes independent action, connecting to remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools and ticketing infrastructure so it can diagnose the endpoint issue, then execute a pre-approved script, verify the device fix, log the action, and close the ticket. It all happens without any human oversight needed. And it documents every action, so there’s always an audit trail of its activity, with approval workflows established by the IT team to ensure strict governance.

Scope

Robin’s architecture also includes a broad scope. It eventually resolves up to 92% of routine technical IT incidents, totally autonomously. This is a much broader range of potential solutions than an AI assistant or chatbot, since Robin can help across siloes or departments. Traditional AI tools might live within the ticketing system, only able to summarize tickets or direct the user to a portal. Robin’s integrations include help desk software, RMM, endpoint management, cloud directory services, employee databases, and local machines to actually find root causes and their solutions.

Outcomes

AI has made plenty of promises, but Robin brings proven outcomes. Users see faster resolution rates, improved mean time to resolution (MTTR), and increased technician capacity. When Robin can take ownership of a ticket and provide the solution, such as a password reset or software install, the cost of the ticket drops to near zero vs. manual costs. One Atera client using Robin saved more than two hours per technician per day.. 24/7 cross-channel remediation also means that users get their problems solved much more quickly. 

Setting the new operational benchmarks for what’s next in IT

The organizations adopting agentic AI right now have moved beyond basic generative AI use or simple chatbots after seeing what’s possible with autonomous digital tools. This adoption will continue to build out the infrastructure and systems for AI usage over the next decades. Adopters now are setting the operational benchmarks that the rest of the market will be measured against in a few more years. 

When an autonomous tool like Robin can take on large amounts of IT help desk friction, the IT team can finally break out of firefighting mode and put their skills to more strategic use, plus cut down on repetitive tasks and help prevent burnout. IT teams with more time away from tickets can build modern infrastructure, solve common issues at their root cause, and otherwise help to drive business growth. Autonomous IT means that business users get the benefit of more uptime and productivity when Robin can solve issues before they’re even noticed.

If you’re envisioning how your organization might benefit from an autonomous digital IT teammate, get started with Robin’s 72-hour proof-of-concept guarantee, or check out this Robin savings calculator.