The mission
Since 1944, Heifer International has worked to end hunger and poverty while caring for the Earth. The organization partners with small-scale farmers and rural communities, providing livestock, agriculture, and training so families can build a lasting, self-sustaining income rather than relying on ongoing aid. Every project is designed around an exit strategy: the goal is for a family or community to eventually stand on its own, then pass that same opportunity on to their neighbors.
For Heifer’s small IT team based in Little Rock, keeping thousands of staff connected across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is its own kind of development challenge: every hour of downtime for a technician in the field is an hour not spent with a farmer, a cooperative, or a community.
The challenge: a 12-hour gap between a ticket and a fix
For years, IT wait time was the biggest friction point standing between Heifer’s staff and the mission.
“Being able to keep our staff connected across those different time zones, across those various areas, is a unique challenge within itself,” said Cedric Lambert, Director of Information Technology, Heifer International.
A staff member in Cambodia submitting a ticket faced a 12-hour gap before Little Rock came online. “We have a ticket that’s open in, let’s say, Cambodia. They’re a 12-hour difference,” Lambert said. “So once our staff gets on board, there is a delay, and they’ve lost a whole business day.”
Marc Daniels, IT Operations Manager, Heifer International, felt that gap from the other side of the queue. “Our users are not getting a response quick enough. They’re having to submit a ticket, and they’re having to wait for us to be online the next morning,” Daniels said.
Heifer tried the usual fixes: extending support hours, experimenting with follow-the-sun coverage. None of it held up. “All those things that we’ve tried, and none of them really seem to have a solid footing to be able to resolve those issues,” Lambert said.
The moment everything changed
Heifer brought on Atera as its IT platform partner, and it was the first demo of Robin, Atera’s Autonomous IT agent, that reframed what the team thought was possible.
“When I saw the demo, I said, this is the future of how IT needs to operate,” Lambert said. “The AI agent itself, Robin, was leaps and bounds above any other product we evaluated. Robin stood out because of how well it was integrated into the ticketing platform.”
What convinced the team wasn’t a feature list. It was how Robin actually resolves an issue: diagnosing the problem, taking the fix directly on the device, and closing the loop with the user, without a technician in the middle.
“Robin is not just telling someone how to open the ticket. It’s actually opening the ticket for them,” Lambert said. “The agent takes care of all the back and forth with the user, analyzing the computer for the issue, and solving that problem directly, without a technician.”
For the high-volume, low-complexity work that used to eat a technician’s day, that shift matters. “The things that just take five minutes for the technician to do, but we’re doing those so many times per day, like changing passwords, resetting a multi-factor authentication device, or troubleshooting their hardware, Robin is going to be able to help change that,” Lambert said.
What it feels like on the ground
For staff who travel constantly and work far outside Little Rock’s business hours, Robin closes the 12-hour gap directly.
“I travel quite a bit for my work, and that puts me in different time zones,” said one Heifer team member. “Robin is going to help me troubleshoot faster, find solutions much quicker, without having to wait for our IT team to come online.”
That immediacy changes how people experience IT support. “The thing that really drove that intrigue for me is the fact that I can talk to it like I’m talking to one of our IT people,” they added.
And for a mission-driven organization, the stakes go beyond convenience. As one Heifer colleague put it, the work is never abstract: “It’s actually impacting a real person, a real family, and a real community.”
Built to get smarter, not just faster
Daniels’ team trains Robin directly, and found the process straightforward from day one. “The tools that Atera gives us to train Robin are very easy to use. They’re intuitive,” he said. When Robin can’t fully resolve something on its own, it still adds value on the way to a technician. “Robin can gather more data, and if it can’t solve the problem, our technicians will be equipped with more information than we previously were.”
That combination, autonomous resolution for the repetitive work plus better-informed handoffs for everything else, is what’s freeing Heifer’s IT team to shift focus. “The real win is to free our technicians up to do more strategic work,” Daniels said. “That means more time on mission, more time spent on technical strategy.”
The impact
With Robin by Atera, Heifer’s IT support no longer stops at the end of a Little Rock business day:
24/7 coverage across every time zone Heifer operates in. Staff in Cambodia, or anywhere else, no longer lose a full business day waiting for a ticket response.
Simple, repetitive fixes resolved without a technician, including password resets, multi-factor authentication issues, hardware troubleshooting, and routine software installs that used to take a technician 10 to 15 minutes on a remote session.
Technicians freed for strategic work, not repetitive tickets, shifting the team’s time toward mission-critical technology strategy.
Faster, more informed support even when Robin escalates, since technicians pick up every ticket with more diagnostic context already gathered.
Robin by Atera is an AI technician that remediates Tier-1 and complex Tier-2 technical incidents end to end by autonomously taking real actions on devices, servers, mainframes, and networks, without needing a technician in the loop.
