Conquering a new reality: A CTO’s Perspective on AI in IT

Oshri: Hi everyone. Hi Jason. 

Jason: Cool, cool, cool. So let’s get right in. 

A bit of agenda for today: some housekeeping and introductions. We have an action-packed schedule for you guys today. We’re going to delve into AI, a bit of background on AI and IT management and platforms. Then, I’ll lead a demo which is going to be very interactive. You guys can type some things into the chat, and we can make this as interactive as possible. I think you guys will really enjoy it. At the end, we will have some live Q&A. Just some housekeeping: this webinar is being recorded, so everybody who needs it can get the recording. It should be automatically sent to you. To keep everything organized, please put all Q&A into the Q&A section. You will see this on the right-hand side of your screen, where you’ll see chat and Q&A. That’s where the Q&A will go. At the end, we will hold a live Q&A session, so all of your questions can be typed in whenever you like, and we’ll get to them. We want to keep this as interactive as possible, so really bring your questions and let us know. That’s what we’re really looking for. 

At Atera, who are we? Basically, we’re a global company operating in about 105 different countries, supporting around 23,000 IT professionals. These IT pros can be IT managers, IT technicians, and other types of professionals. At the moment, we have around 5 million managed endpoints. If you don’t know what Atera does, I’m going to explain in the next slide, so don’t worry. We have 320 million automated monthly IT actions within our platform. These actions are happening on the backend of Atera. We like to think of ourselves at Atera as an extra technician added to your arsenal. 

So, who are we at Atera? First and foremost, we are an IT management platform, an all-in-one cloud-based system that helps you manage your IT operations. IT technicians, IT managers, CTOs, CIOs—everyone can manage their network within one pane of glass. This includes network security, patching, remote monitoring and management, help desk and ticketing, and more. We have taken a holistic approach where we’ve baked AI into our platform. We foster innovation and are one of the leading companies to have these AI capabilities integrated. Besides that, we have network monitoring tools for security, reporting tools for BI analytics, and an app center for established antiviruses and backup solutions. All your IT operations can be managed within one pane of glass, which is something we hold close to us and strive to keep within Atera. 

Now, I’ll turn this over to Oshri, who is very excited to let you guys know what’s going on within AI and IT. Oshri, take it away. 

Oshri: Thank you, Jason. As you probably know, AI is the hottest topic these days. Everybody is talking about AI, how good it has become, and how fast the technology is evolving. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT-3, many big companies have joined and developed infrastructures, tools, and models. You have Microsoft and OpenAI releasing GPT-4, Google with Bard, Meta just released Llama 2 as a free large language model, and more. You’ll see more and more big companies creating infrastructure for other companies that are more industry-specific, building tools in specific segments. For example, Writer.com for content, MidJourney for images, and many sales and marketing tools. For designers, you have Canva and Adobe. You’ll see much more industry-specific tools popping up in gaming, health, energy—actually everything that can be improved. 

One of the things we are seeing these days in many companies and industries is that every CEO today is asking their managers, CIOs, and executives, “What is your AI strategy?” How can you leverage the power of AI to make your business more efficient, faster, and provide much better services? You guys should also ask yourselves, “What is your AI strategy?” Let me help you a bit with that. I have gathered some AI strategic use cases that can help you develop more intelligent products, provide more intelligent services, automate repetitive tasks, make business processes faster, smarter, and more efficient. If you’re in manufacturing, how can you automate processes? Things like that.

Moving into IT, we can leverage the power of AI in IT management. We’re introducing the concept of AI-powered IT management, and Atera is leading this movement. We know that AI can help us be much more effective and efficient. We’re not talking about small, incremental improvements; we’re talking about exponential impact—something like 10x more efficient using these tools. Jason will show in the live demo the things we have released that will help you achieve this amazing impact.

So, for example, we developed a feature where your technician can open tickets for your customers. Usually, it takes time to respond because you’re busy with other tasks. Before the AI capabilities we added, our data showed that technicians handled about seven tickets per day on average. However, customers using our new system in beta are seeing amazing results. We’re talking about 70 tickets per day per technician, with a three-second first response time because it’s an immediate response. When someone connects to your system and opens a ticket, they get an immediate response from the chatbot, which Jason will show you in a few minutes. The overall time for resolution has gone from four hours down to 10 minutes. This means your customer doesn’t have to wait, making both you and your end-users more efficient. 

Jason: Cool, thank you, Oshri. Before I start, I want to open a quick poll to see how many of you are currently using Atera. Let’s see, are you guys currently Atera customers? I see we have three that are, some that are not, and no one is trialing. For those who aren’t Atera users, you have a free 30-day trial to test us out. For those who are already customers, welcome and thank you for joining us today. I’m going to share my screen now so you can see. In the chat, can you let me know if you can see my screen? Just to make sure I’m sharing the right screen. Perfect, thanks, Brad. 

This demonstration is relevant for both MSPs and internal IT departments. It can help internal IT with simple tasks and assist MSPs in providing quicker responses to their customers. The idea is to save you time, which in turn saves you money, and allows you to focus on other projects or find new customers. I want to keep this as interactive as possible. In the chat, please give me an idea or a common issue that we can ask our AI assistant. If you don’t have any, I have a few prepared examples. I’ll give you a few seconds to type something in the chat. Okay, I see a few suggestions. I’ll start with a prepared example related to SharePoint and OneDrive. Let’s say a user, logged in as Jay, can’t see their shared folder. I’ll type in, “I can’t see my shared folder,” and let’s see what the AI assistant provides. The AI responds within seconds, asking for more information about the issue. Jay, not knowing much about computers, mentions something about Microsoft. I’ll type, “There’s some error about Microsoft.” The AI assistant asks for the exact error message or a screenshot. Jay then sees the error says it can’t sync the folder. I’ll type, “The error says it can’t sync the folder.” 

The AI assistant now provides a solution from our approved solutions bank, suggesting to reset OneDrive sync. I’ll click on the suggested solution to see if it solves the problem. The AI confirms the next steps, ensuring multi-factor verification for security. Remember, as an MSP or internal IT, you have the flexibility to choose how to use these tools. You can decide which customers or departments have access to the AI assistant, tailoring it to your workflow. This concludes our demonstration. We hope you find these new AI capabilities as exciting and useful as we do. Now, let’s move on to the live Q&A session. Please type your questions in the Q&A section, and we’ll address them shortly.

Oshri: So, for example, we developed a feature where your technician can open tickets for your customers. Usually, it takes time to respond because you’re busy with other tasks. Before the AI capabilities we added, our data showed that technicians handled about seven tickets per day on average. However, customers using our new system in beta are seeing amazing results. We’re talking about 70 tickets per day per technician, with a three-second first response time because it’s an immediate response. When someone connects to your system and opens a ticket, they get an immediate response from the chatbot, which Jason will show you in a few minutes. The overall time for resolution has gone from four hours down to 10 minutes. This means your customer doesn’t have to wait, making both you and your end-users more efficient. 

Jason: Cool, thank you, Oshri. Before I start, I want to open a quick poll to see how many of you are currently using Atera. Let’s see, are you guys currently Atera customers? I see we have three that are, some that are not, and no one is trialing. For those who aren’t Atera users, you have a free 30-day trial to test us out. For those who are already customers, welcome and thank you for joining us today. I’m going to share my screen now so you can see. In the chat, can you let me know if you can see my screen? Just to make sure I’m sharing the right screen. Perfect, thanks, Brad. 

This demonstration is relevant for both MSPs and internal IT departments. It can help internal IT with simple tasks and assist MSPs in providing quicker responses to their customers. The idea is to save you time, which in turn saves you money, and allows you to focus on other projects or find new customers. I want to keep this as interactive as possible. In the chat, please give me an idea or a common issue that we can ask our AI assistant. If you don’t have any, I have a few prepared examples. I’ll give you a few seconds to type something in the chat. Okay, I see a few suggestions. I’ll start with a prepared example related to SharePoint and OneDrive. Let’s say a user, logged in as Jay, can’t see their shared folder. I’ll type in, “I can’t see my shared folder,” and let’s see what the AI assistant provides. 

The AI responds within seconds, asking for more information about the issue. Jay, not knowing much about computers, mentions something about Microsoft. I’ll type, “There’s some error about Microsoft.” The AI assistant asks for the exact error message or a screenshot. Jay then sees the error says it can’t sync the folder. I’ll type, “The error says it can’t sync the folder.” The AI assistant now provides a solution from our approved solutions bank, suggesting to reset OneDrive sync. I’ll click on the suggested solution to see if it solves the problem. The AI confirms the next steps, ensuring multi-factor verification for security. If the AI is unable to resolve the issue, it automatically creates a ticket. Now, let’s switch to the Atera platform and check the ticket page. You will see that a ticket has been created with the title “Unable to access shared folder.” The AI has already summarized the conversation and the issue. 

Let’s say there was a long conversation between the AI and the end-user. By clicking the AI black box, you get a summary of what the AI and the end-user discussed. It shows that the user had trouble accessing their shared folder and there was an error message related to Microsoft. The technician asked for more information and learned that the issue was with syncing the folder. The solution could not be rolled out due to unsuccessful multi-factor verification. The AI can also generate a solution. For some issues, it can even generate a script. Let’s check another ticket where the AI provided a script. For example, a ticket where the user was out of disk space. The AI summary is available, and we can generate a solution. Here, the AI provides a script to free up disk space by deleting unnecessary files and programs. 

The AI-generated script is reviewed by the technician, who can make any necessary edits. Once satisfied, the technician names the script, for example, “Free Disk Space,” and saves it. The script can then be executed on the user’s device. This process saves a significant amount of time. If the issue was resolved by the AI in the portal, that’s already a lot of time saved. If not, the technician can quickly address it by using the AI summary and generated scripts. 

Another place we’ve implemented AI is in the command line interface. Let’s go to the devices tab and select a device. From the command prompt, you can ask the AI to suggest commands. For example, you can ask, “What is the largest file in the directory?” The AI will provide the command to find the largest file. This concludes our demonstration. We hope you find these new AI capabilities as exciting and useful as we do. Now, let’s move on to the live Q&A session. Please type your questions in the Q&A section, and we’ll address them shortly.

Okay, let’s see what it gives us. Again, I’m not the sharpest on the command line, but also if you can come in here and say, “Is this something that works? Is this something that you see would work on the command line?” Absolutely, and I think this shows a very sophisticated command line action. It’s actually creating a loop that runs on all the files recursively and finds the largest one. It can take some time, but yeah. Cool, so I’ve illustrated to you guys the impact that we have within the platform. I think I’m going to stop sharing my screen now because I see that we’re running low on time. We’ll go back to the presentation, and I’ll hand it back over to Oshri, who will explain what we’re doing at Atera to ensure compliance, governance, and security when using these tools. 

Oshri: Thank you, Jason. That was a wonderful demo. Every time we show what we’re doing to our customers, the first question that pops up is, “Are you guys sharing my data? Is OpenAI seeing my tickets?” It’s a reasonable concern, and we want to clarify everything and let you know how we’re handling data and security. First of all, it’s important to understand that we are not using OpenAI directly. We are using Microsoft Azure OpenAI, which is a static representation of the model deployed in a closed and private network inside Microsoft Azure. If you look up “Microsoft Azure OpenAI data privacy,” you’ll see that they state they are not using your data to train models or moving your data to OpenAI. Atera does not provide any data to OpenAI. Only when you click “summary” do we take the specific text, summarize it, and give you a solution. We are very aware of privacy concerns and security, and we are on it. Feel free to visit our trust page on the Atera website for more information about our security and privacy measures. We have implemented the latest security mechanisms, including mandatory 2FA authentication and IP whitelisting. We are continuously updating our certifications, such as ISO 27017, ISO 27018, and GDPR compliance, to keep our platform and company safe and secure. 

Jason: Let me jump back in here. We want to show you guys that we already have customers using our AI features. We have a few people in our beta program who have been using the AI assistant and the script generator, and they are really seeing the value. We are taking AI seriously and implementing it in ways that will benefit you the most. 

I see we’re a bit ahead of schedule, so let’s jump right into the Q&A. I’ll stop sharing my screen, and we can address your questions. 

Question: For remote access, will we also need a Splashtop subscription, or is that built into the customer Atera? 

Jason:  Splashtop is included in all our plans, so you won’t need a separate Splashtop subscription. It’s included with all the plans. 

Question: Can we teach the AI how to deal with specific problems, and will it handle them moving forward the way we taught it?

Oshri: I can’t share everything we’re working on right now, but we have plans that will go even beyond that. I can promise you that we’re working on some exciting features. 

Question: When will the AI assistant be out of beta? 

Oshri: We’re seeing a lot of usage, and it’s increasing exponentially. We’re also limited by OpenAI and Microsoft, so we need to add customers gradually. It will be out of beta very soon. 

Question: What limitations are there from OpenAI?

Oshri: OpenAI limits the rate of queries we can do per minute. We’re working closely with Microsoft to get more quotas, but everyone is now leveraging AI, so we’re all fighting for quotas. 

Question: Will there be playbooks to automate the AI? 

Oshri: I’m not sure I completely understand the question, but I think playbooks in general are something that generative AI can help with. We aim to offer the best solutions and automate processes as much as possible. 

Question: Can the AI act on its own without being prompted? 

Oshri: Currently, it only responds to user requests. However, if the AI identifies a solution that is risk-free, it will offer it. If the solution carries some risk, it will escalate the issue to a technician for further action. Thank you all for your questions. If there’s anything else you’d like to know, please feel free to ask. We appreciate your participation and look forward to continuing to provide you with innovative solutions.

Jason: I see there were two questions that I didn’t answer from Eden and Roland, but I think we kind of did address them. Oshri also touched on these points earlier. These are things that we might look at in the future. I didn’t want to leave Ed and Robert out, so I’m shouting you guys out here. We did cover this, but if there’s anything else, please let us know. 

If there are any other questions, we still have a few more minutes. We actually have eight minutes left. Otherwise, we can end early, and everyone can carry on with their day. Just to clarify, the AI assistant is in beta now. If you want to join, just leave us your email, and we’ll be glad to add you to the beta. 

Oshri: Yes, it is in beta now. If you provide your email, we can add you to the beta program. 

Jason: You already have access to the AI within the platform and the script generator. The AI assistant in the customer or help desk portal is what is in beta. If you pop your email in the chat, we’ll try our best to add everyone. 

Question: With this AI, is it based on the OpenAI subscription? 

Oshri: No, we handle all the communication with OpenAI. It’s actually Microsoft Azure OpenAI, as I mentioned. We manage the connection, so you don’t need to do anything. Just log into our system, and you’ll get everything that Jason showed right out of the box. 

Jason: Another question was about whether the AI chat can convert the problem into a ticket. Yes, it can. That’s exactly what it does. I can quickly share my screen again to show you. Here, you can see a ticket that was created from an AI chat. The AI and the end-user had a conversation about a problem, and the AI automatically created a ticket with the correct title based on the issue discussed. This ensures that if the AI can’t solve the problem, or if you want a record of what happened, it automatically opens a ticket for you. 

I see Robert has no more questions, just recognition. Thank you so much, Robert. We appreciate it. Let’s see if there are any other questions. 

I think we’ve answered the rest of the questions. We have five minutes left, so we’ll launch a quick survey. The reason for these surveys is to gather your feedback and improve our webinars.  

Thank you all for participating in today’s webinar. We hope you found it informative and useful. If you have any further questions or need additional information, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Have a great day, everyone!