AIT Masterclass Introduction

As a reminder, today’s session is part one of our two-part AI masterclass series. Today’s session is the introduction to AIT, and we’ll walk you through the basics and provide a high-level overview of our AIT offering. Feel free to open your Atera platform alongside this webinar and follow along with us. Part two of the AIT masterclass webinar series will be held this Thursday, and that will be our AI Workshop. This will be more of a hands-on interactive workshop where you’ll be actively working on your dashboard as we guide you through a variety of scenarios designed to help you master Atera’s AI platform. Before we get started, just a quick note to ensure that you get the best out of today’s session: if you wish to ask a question, and we encourage you to do so, please make sure to use the Q&A section or the Q&A feature on the side panel of your screen. This way, we can make sure to answer all of your questions and ensure they don’t get lost. I think that’s all. We have a great agenda lined up for you today, and I don’t want to take any more of your time. So, Jason, I’m going to hand over to you to get started. 

Jason: Cool, thank you, Meira. Hi guys, let me stop sharing my screen and put on the other screen. Give me a second. I know most of you guys have probably seen me before, so welcome back. I hope you guys enjoy seeing me as much as I enjoy doing these presentations. Give me one second while I sort this out. Like Meira said, the purpose of this workshop is to get you guys to a point where you will be able to use AI effectively. I know some of you have already seen the AI in action, maybe you joined our virtual event last week. This workshop is a continuation of that, aimed at helping you leverage AI. If you want to be part of the autopilot and co-pilot part of AIT, which is where our AI sits, please email us at [email protected], and we will be able to help you. Okay, let’s get started. I’ve got a bit of a presentation here. The presentation part is for you to sit back, relax, and if you’ve got questions, put them in the Q&A. Meira will be able to answer them, and we’ll answer some of them live at the end. Really, ask us anything. Let’s begin. So, first and foremost, this is an introduction to our masterclass, which will walk you through step-by-step how to set up and perform certain actions. The second part will involve going into the service or customer portal. This part will show you what you need to set up correctly so that you can start leveraging this with your customers or within your company if you’re an internal IT manager. The agenda today includes a series intro, an AIT brief, and then we’ll do the setup part, which will be live on the platform. I hope you have your platform open and follow me along. Then we’ll have a Q&A at the end. Basically, this series is designed to change things up a bit. Usually, I do one webinar where I cover the intro, setup, demo, and workshop all in one. We’ve decided to split it up in the hopes that you will join me again on Thursday for the second part. Today is the intro, and Thursday will be the hands-on workshop. For those who are new or still trialing, Atera is a global entity in the IT world, operating in about 105 countries. We have about 4.2 million devices under management, which means we have 4.2 million devices being monitored by IT managers and MSPs. We’ve used this data to identify common issues within IT teams, such as printer errors. In terms of our AI, we have solutions to help you in your everyday tasks. We process over 1 million tickets, and most of our AI is currently leveraged within customer service portals and the ticketing section of Atera. We have multiple awards and are a world-class organization committed to thinking about the future and leveraging tools to make your lives easier.

Like I said before, where we have access to the device, we can look and monitor. We can see if there is an error, maybe the computer is overheating, or maybe the network is slow. Because we have access to the information as a monitoring platform, we can then leverage this information and use AI to solve the problem. At the moment, there’s a bank of 500 actions and checks. This is obviously just going to grow and grow. All of this is really aimed at making the initial step of helping your customers or end users seamless and easy, solving problems without any wait time at the start. So that’s the autopilot part. For now, it’s within the service desk portal or customer portal, as you guys will see. Moving forward in 2.0, things might really creep into other sides of the platform concept. 

So then we have co-pilot. Now we have the top five consuming requests. If you look at things like this, you’ll see that most of the time these requests don’t really need the assistance of an IT manager or a technician. These things can be solved a lot faster. Yes, I agree, if there are more complicated ones, they would be escalated to you. But basic things can be solved quickly. For example, access and permissions might be escalated to you, but you already know what you have to do without asking the first few questions. The AI will ask the questions, and if it needs to be escalated, it will come to you, and you’ll know exactly what you need to do. That’s why the resolution time drops dramatically because you know exactly what you need to do. You see what the summary gives you, and then you take action from there. Email issues like “my email is not opening,” hardware issues like “printer is not printing,” maybe it’s a spooler error—these things can be actioned before they come to you. There are times when these things will be solved before you even look at them. If you want them to, they’ll be saved as tickets, so you’ll see them as a ticket. But these are things that can be done without you doing anything. 

The co-pilot now comes into play when a ticket is escalated. For example, if a customer wants to be added to an email group, maybe you don’t want them to have permission to add themselves. So they’ll escalate to you, and when it comes to you, you’ll have access to the ticket summary. There might be a long transcript of the discussion. What will happen is that it will give you a ticket summary, a suggested reply, and then solutions. There will be solutions that will just say “click,” and it will allow a certain action to happen on the backend of that certain device. These things are really saving time at the end of the day.

We have sentiment analysis. This is especially important for the MSPs out there. If you have a very angry customer who’s using caps lock and saying things like “you guys are so slow,” that will show as sentiment. You can see when the ticket gets escalated if the customer or the end user is annoyed, and you can tackle those ones first before someone who is happy. We have auto-tagging tickets. These are nice for when you want to build reports or create separate ticket queues for happy customers or other specific issues. Auto-tagging helps in organizing and prioritizing tickets.

Next, we have SNMP configuration, ticket schedulers, command line generators, and script generators. These are more on the RMM side of monitoring but are still extremely helpful for those who know how to script. For example, generating scripts to avoid typing all the time. You can simply say “clear cache” in a script, and it will generate something for you. On Thursday, we’ll go into specific examples, showing you how these features work. We’ll give you examples of an angry customer and see what the sentiment analysis says. Meira and I are going to play around with it and see how the AI interprets different inputs like all caps or no caps. It’s going to be really fun, so I hope you join us for that session. 

Now, I’m going to share my other screen so that I can show my platform. This would be the time where I hope you guys will join me. Open up your platform and join me in doing the actions that I’m going to do. Let me move that over there and share the screen. How are you guys feeling so far? You guys still okay out there? No questions? We’re not doing Q&A now, but I hope you’re all doing good. Okay, let’s go. For those guys, I see that most of you are customers. Thanks, Richard. Thanks, Jeff. This is the platform. I’m sure you guys have all seen it. How I want to start this is by showing you how to set it up first. For the autopilot, like I mentioned before, that’s going to be within the customer portal or service desk. So let’s go into admin. I want to start with the initial setup. Let’s say you don’t do ticketing with Atera. I really feel that this should push you to maybe make use of our ticketing system. All of you here who are Atera customers, our ticketing system is there for you at no extra charge. 

These are things that you have already, so why not leverage them? And now there’s more incentive for you to use our ticketing system because we have all these cool AI features built into it. First, I want to show you the email settings. Why do we want to have email settings? Email settings are also part of customer portal settings and ticketing settings. This is what’s going to generate a ticket if you are emailing a customer. When a customer emails you, this is more for the emailing side, but I thought I’d show you because there’s something at the bottom that I want to show you guys. I’m just going to skim through it. 

This is the email address that you have to put into the forwarding rule in the email box you are getting emails in. If your support address or your address you want to receive tickets to is, for example, [email protected] or [email protected], then the tickets will be forwarded into the Atera system. That’s when tickets will then show up in the tickets section. Again, with the settings, I’m not going to go into too much detail. 

This is just so that you don’t get a [email protected] if you respond back to the person. 

Let’s go down. I’m not really going to go through all of these. What I want to show you guys here at the bottom is something that, if you haven’t added the users already, I want you to use. This will send your end users an email when you add them. As you can see here, when we add a user, especially this bottom one, we want to send them an email. What does that email contain? It contains credentials. I’m going to show you what that is. When you add a new user with the email address, this is what they’re going to get. If we go into the template, this template should already be preset. Let’s go back and see. Let’s go to admin here. We’ll go to email templates from here—a lot quicker. It should be, I think, service portal credentials. Here we go. Why this is important is that this is going to send the end user their login information. Most of the time, actually all of the time, the username will be the email address. It’s the password that they need to get. This is one of the ways to get the password to your end users. There are a few ways that you can get the password to your end users. I’m mentioning these things because I want you to be prepared for when we give you access to the AI. I want you to know exactly how you are going to get the usernames and passwords to your end users. This is what’s going to be sent when you add a new user. If you already have your users within the platform, let’s say you already use our ticketing system, and you have the customers or employees already inside the platform, there are a few ways to tackle this. There’s something that we’re currently developing that will allow this to be pushed—the username and password—to the end user. But there are a few ways you can do it. You can email all your customers or end users with the specific help desk portal link, and then they can use the username and say “forgot password.” There are other ways you can do it. You can create a ticket automation rule that sends a message, and if they respond with “forgot password,” you can use the same template, and it will send the customer the username and password automatically. We’re going to have something new in development that will make this process a lot easier.

Okay, next thing I want to show you guys is white labeling. As you guys are aware, you might not want to see the Atera icon; you want to see your business icon. Where do we see that? We’ll see that in the White Label section over here. So we’ll click there, and again, you add your logo to the service portal. Now, if you guys are MSPs, you’ll see the customer portal there. Don’t worry, it’s pretty much a one-to-one match, and you can pick the colors of it. You just upload what you want, and when you send emails and things like that, your company logo and colors will be displayed. This is where you can add your company icon, which will show in the taskbar that you see over there, and within the actual portal that you’ll have on a browser. The logo and color will be what’s inside the portal for your customers. Just a mention that the help desk agent is currently only available for Windows, but this is going to be a way that your end users will be able to log into the portal a lot easier, and maybe there’ll be a few new cool features around that as well. 

Next, I want to go into the initial setup and the initial look of where we will see the service portal options. What do we see here? This is basically giving you the configuration. It’s not that difficult; it’s pretty straightforward in how you set this up. This is going to be the portal or the URL that the end users will use to log into the portal. You’ll see we have a custom one. If you want SSL, we have that available. Please reach out to us if that’s something you would like with these specific URLs. But again, for now, you can just use this one over here. You can copy this, paste it, and send it to your end users. This is something that they’ll be able to use to log in. Again, very simple and very easy.

These are the options that you can choose to have on or off. We have ticketing here; this is going to be ticketing that will be within the platform. If you want the ticketing tab to be available within the service desk or customer portal, this is where you’ll have it on or off. You can choose this to be on for all customers or only for certain customers. If you aren’t aware, you can also have a knowledge base within the customer or service desk portal. You can choose whether specific customers have access to a knowledge base that you have built and created. I see it working hand in hand in terms of having solutions available for customers in a knowledge base and using the AI to help solve problems as well. You’re doing it both ways together, really helpful. 

The AI assistant is where the AI comes into life. This is what we refer to as the autopilot. I see Constantino says that he can’t see the AI assistant in his portal. You won’t see it currently; we need to give you access to that. Just let us know, and we can open it for you. We’ll do our best to get you this recording afterwards so you can follow along once you have access to the portal. If you want to have the AI assistant on or off, it’s up to you. You can choose which departments or customers you want to use the AI. You have the option. The ticket creation option means that every time there’s a chat with AI from the end user, it will automatically open a ticket. I would tend to have this on most of the time because I want to keep track of all the tickets that have been created, whether you’ve been working on them or not. I think it’s still relevant for both MSPs and internal IT. Hide new tickets: If you don’t want end users to open a ticket directly to you, you can hide this button. The only option they have to open a ticket is to use the AI. Again, you have the choice to have this on or off. 

Self-service actions range from resetting passwords to restarting and logging out from the device. Very basic and simple self-service actions for now. We’ll add more actions as we go along. For now, you have shutdown, logout, change password, and a few more which we’ll cover on Thursday. 

Software installation falls under self-service actions. For example, if an end user says they can’t open a Zoom meeting, the AI will check the software inventory of the device and see if Zoom is installed. If it’s not installed, the AI will suggest installing Zoom. The end user will click install, Zoom gets installed, and the ticket is closed. This saves you time because the AI identifies the root cause quickly. You have the option to add software that you’re essentially whitelisting for your end users. This brings together the ticketing and RMM, leveraging all these points to develop the AIT we’ve introduced. This is just the start of what we’re doing—smart solutions, quick solutions, things that we feel will really change the way IT management platforms are viewed in the world. T

That’s about it for the setup. We have 20 minutes left, which is perfectly on time. I’m going to stop sharing my screen, and we will take some questions from the audience. I appreciate that most of you have stayed this long. We’re here to answer any questions you have. Meira or myself will answer, so feel free to ask whatever you like. If you want me to go back and show you something, I can do that, or answer any questions you have. I prefer if you put questions in the Q&A section and comments in the general chat, just so we can better help you. 

Meira: Can you hear me now? Yes, you should be able to. I see there’s a question that says, “Is the AI language independent?” I assume that means can you get it in other languages? Kristoff, I believe it’s available in a few languages. I need to double-check exactly, but I think so. It’s available in most languages if I’m not mistaken. One of our customers tested it in Polish, and I think it worked in Polish. So yes, it supports most languages. 

Jason: Cool. I’ve moved some of the questions. Let’s make sure I’ve moved all of them. 

Okay, let me move that. Okay, let’s go. Cool, let me start with Jeff. So, the first question is: will the software update as new releases are offered? This is a good question. What will happen is that it depends on the software. If it’s from Chocolatey and Homebrew, you can update that software from within an IT automation profile. So that will happen because the software is installed through Atera. There’s a link between our repositories, and if you have the IT automation profile that updates software, then yes. Jeff, how do we get an Atera hat? 

Jeff, message me. Maybe I’ll send you this one if we can do the house swap still. I haven’t forgotten. Is there a way to create a catalog of options for the user to create a ticket? If you’re talking about ticketing forms, like a form that catalogs options for the user to create a ticket, I think you’re talking about forms. We’re working on that. If that’s what you mean, Jan, please clarify exactly what you mean for your question, and then I’ll get back to it. You can email [email protected] and just say you want access to the AI beta, and we’ll add you to the list. 

What about more detailed software such as QuickBooks and Sage? Will there be a way to run those updates or new installs? It depends if they’re available on Chocolatey and Homebrew. Looking at QuickBooks and Sage, I’m not sure, but we are releasing soon a private repository which will link to a repository that you have. Down the line, we’ll have a link between your private repository and the software in the list that I showed you. Eventually, you’ll also be able to update through that private repository as well. That’s something that’s coming in the next few weeks. Do users require licenses? No, only the technician requires the license for now. We’re not sure how it will go in the future. This is obviously a very new solution. For now, there’s no charge for the AI at all. What you’re paying for now and what package you have includes everything. The end user doesn’t need to have a license at all. In the future, it might change, but I don’t know. We’re doing analysis as we go along. 

Can the self-installed software inventory be able to pull from Azure? Richard, I think you’re talking about a repository. At the moment, once we release our private repository, I think your repository can be on Azure. Eventually, it will be part of what will be able to be pulled from a private repository, which we’re still working on releasing. Can we set a different list of self-service apps for each end customer? For now, I don’t see it being possible. It’s just one list for all. Eventually, we might be able to segment them and choose who you want access for what, but for now, it’s just a set of whitelisted applications for all your customers and end users. Jason: Is the self-service software repository built in Chocolatey? Will there be a way to add our own packages for inclusion? This is what I was talking about before, Robert, with a private repository. There will be a link to another repository. We have three different options for other repositories. I need to double-check for you. We’re in the final stages of that, where there’ll be a private repository sitting on the outside. There will be APIs linking Atera and the external repository, allowing a two-way sync. You’ll be able to add things within Atera, and eventually, there will be a way to do these software installations in the AI portal. 

Back at the email setup, I had no templates in the setup. You need to go and search. I’ll show you what I mean. Give me a second. Let’s go here and share. This is for Curtis. Let’s go to admin. Then we want to look at email templates. It looks like there’s nothing here, but it’s all here. You should have preset options here. Eventually, I don’t know at the moment, but that would be really cool. I heard a sales call that was on AI, a full-on sales conversation between an AI and a person trying to buy something. It was insane. You would never have guessed it was AI. You can tell the pauses are a bit long, but eventually, I see it getting to that. We don’t have that yet.

Brett asked, “Can I ask AI to tell me why CPU, memory, and disk usage are high and how to fix it?” This is the beauty of what’s happening with the AI agent on the device. It might be able to tell you if the computer is overheating because we’re monitoring the device’s temperature, fan speeds, RAM, CPU, etc. There will be ways to pinpoint why the computer is slow. If the internet is slow and we do a ping test, we can realize the internet is slow because of a specific issue. The AI does standard checks when an end user opens a support ticket, and if it gets escalated to you, you’ll have the checks there. 

Meira: Are users currently using the trial version of Atera allowed to try the AI feature? That is a good question. We need to check that. I’m not sure. Please send an email to [email protected] and ask there. We might be able to, but I don’t want to promise anything. 

Jason: If a user has multiple devices, is there a way to link them to one account? At the moment, it will be on the device the user is currently on. We don’t allow multiple devices to one user, but it’s a good point. It will be on the device the user is logged on with. For now, it’s only available on Windows devices. My service portal only has ticketing and knowledge base. Will the others be available for subscription? Curtis, we need to check if we can have the AI assistant activated for trial users. Everyone who is a user of Atera, please email us, and we will add you to the list. How do we automate the activation of the token that is necessary to allow the end user to the support portal? At the moment, we’re working on something that will allow the end user on a Windows device to log in through the system tray, open the support portal, and then open up the portal with no login. It’s still in development. 

Clary, at the moment, no. We’re still doing market research on how other companies are leveraging AI and how we want to charge for it. I don’t have anything yet on that. I think that’s it. On Thursday, I hope you guys all register and join Meira and me. We will be happy to see you guys. Meira, do you want to launch the survey? 

Meira: Yes. I would just like to say thanks to Jason for such a great session. I hope you guys feel like you learned a lot. We had great engagement with the Q&A, so I’m hoping to see you all here on Thursday. I’m going to launch a survey. If you can just take a few minutes to give us your feedback, it would be great. Your feedback really drives the way we do these sessions going forward. We want to see what you like and what you want to know more about. 

Jason: Cool. I think you guys can answer the survey. We’re not going to wait for the next two minutes just to look pretty. Thank you guys so much for joining, and we’ll see you guys on Thursday. Thank you so much, and have an amazing day. Keep safe and keep well. Bye! 

Meira: Bye, guys!