Lamps Plus is the largest retail lighting company in the United States, with 40 stores, two distribution centers, a headquarters, and a call center that handles calls from its website. Behind it all is an IT team of about 70, led on infrastructure by Eric Denholtz. With Robin by Atera, that team went from chasing down users to working alongside an AI technician that handles the small problems, spots trends across tickets, and writes the knowledge base articles no one had time to write. “Before Robin, IT support at Lamps Plus was a mess, and today it’s organized and hopeful,” says Denholtz.
The challenge
Denholtz and his team support a mix of environments: store iPads, point-of-sale devices, corporate laptops, and MacBooks, plus a call center spread across the US and overseas. He considers that call center his number one customer, because its agents talk to shoppers every day. Every fix meant tracking down a user and working through one of several remote-control tools, and many user-facing devices had no support solution at all. Like many IT organizations, the team was stretched thin, with more requests than hands to handle them.
The solution
Robin by Atera changed that. It is not a chatbot or an answer engine. It is an AI technician that lives on the user’s device, knows who they are and which machine they’re on, and takes real actions on the device, in the cloud, and in domain controllers when the team grants access. At Lamps Plus, Robin joined the Tier-1 and Tier-2 team as a teammate that never stops, so technicians could stop firefighting and start solving bigger problems.
“The best thing about Robin overall, and the core value proposition, is the ability to solve the small problems,” says Denholtz. Those small problems add up: file and SharePoint access, drive mappings, printer setup. When someone asks for access, Robin emails their manager an approval button, and once the manager approves, Robin grants it. Employees ask questions where they already work, and every question becomes a ticket, so the help desk always sees what’s happening.
Robin also gives the team something it never had time to build. It spots patterns across tickets, like repeated password reset questions or a patch slowing one machine model, and suggests an automation or script to fix them. When an issue keeps coming up, it drafts a knowledge base article for the team to approve, and once published, that article is available to Robin for future tickets. Employees no longer have to wait for support or hesitate to ask IT. For Denholtz, the message to other IT leaders is simple: if you want to reduce tech debt and free your team to work on more important things, Atera is worth the investment.
