Thinking about AI adoption, and how it can make all the difference to your MSP business? We’re here for it! In this article, we’ll look at how we know AI isn’t just a passing trend, and give you some examples of how you can use artificial intelligence as an MSP or corporate IT professional to take your business to supercharged new heights!
Follow the money!
The idea of “follow the money” comes from Richard Tubb, an IT consultant and superstar MSP and the host of TubbTalk, the podcast for IT consultants. The theory is simple – if you want to know what trends are for real, and what’s just hype, look at where venture capitalists, investors and customers are throwing their hard-earned cash.
For example, in February 2021 – MSP Sales Acceleration platform Zomentum raised $13M for their AI-enabled business intelligence suite, and more recently, Swish.ai announced $13M in funding for their own hyper-automation solution for MSPs. Let’s face it – AI is big news!
Here at Atera, we’re proud to be part of the shift in the market, and in July, we raised $77 million for our patented AI technology, which includes our AI ticket tags feature – already in the Atera solution.
AI ticket tags
Our AI ticket auto-tags are super cool (if we say so ourselves) offering MSPs the ability to categorize and manage their tickets on receipt, without a lot of the manual work that goes into classifying and channelling tags to the right technicians or members of staff.
“The AI system understands the context of the ticket and gives it a label to help you get visibility over the issues that are coming in.” said Oshri Moyal, our CTO here at Atera, in a recent talk on TubbTalk. “On top of that, the AI dispatcher uses extensive automation based on the tagging to send the tags to the right person. If you have a problem with a printer and you have a technician who is an expert in hardware or printers, you can auto-dispatch the issue to him, and get the problem solved a lot faster.”
This helps to streamline workflows, stops technicians from cherry-picking only the tasks they want to work on, and levels the playing field for customers when they send in ticket requests. All tickets will be solved according to the right priority, sent to the best expert for the task at hand, and hopefully resolved a whole lot faster and with greater accuracy.
Why is AI the Next Big Thing?
AI auto-tagging is the first of many AI-based features that we’re working on at Atera, following the market on a path that’s lit up with opportunity by AI and Machine Learning. But why does AI offer so much promise for MSPs? Here are some of the main use cases for AI as we see them:
Eliminating manual tasks: Think about our script library and how many tasks can now be run with the click of a button. Bringing together the idea of AI auto-tagging and scripts for example, you can see how our auto-healing scripts work, and how tickets could be auto-resolved with the help of AI and automation, for example restarting the print spooler service or the router for a WiFi problem as soon as an issue has been found.
SLA management: Your SLA isn’t just for your customers, it’s a running log of how productive you’re being internally as an MSP. That means, the better you meet your SLA for the customers, the more money you’re making and the less time you’re wasting. AI can use historical data and baselines to help you to understand what requests might risk your SLA ahead of time, showing you new paid opportunities, or where to schedule a customer meeting to discuss an upsell.
Asset maintenance: Gone are the days where you can’t know about a problem with a machine or a device until your customer is left unstuck. By using AI and Machine Learning models across all of your assets, and by allowing models to train on millions of data points made available around the world, you can estimate when breakdowns will occur, pre-empt maintenance schedules when it will cause the least business disruption, and plan ahead to minimize downtime.
Security insights: Cyberattacks are increasingly using automation and bots to send attacks into your customer networks, so you need to be fighting fire with fire. AI can scan for anomalies and detect problems with much greater speed and accuracy than the human eye, and identify root causes for problems like access management, password lockouts, or data loss.
Billing and invoicing: Think about billing alongside other repetitive monthly tasks that you complete each cycle, and how AI could streamline and support the way you manage these essential jobs. For example, AI could check data for anomalies or signs of fraud, validate information against SLAs or contracts, and extract data with more accuracy and compliance in seconds, than a team full of HR managers could do in a week.
AI is the route to better service delivery and increased profits – fact
IDC estimates that in 2022, spending on AI systems will reach $77.6 billion. Your customers consider Remote Monitoring and Management, Helpdesk, work from home tools and various security software to be the bare minimum when you’re offering IT services.
With digital transformation continuing to accelerate, and the pace of change hitting warp-speed, will 2022 be the year you raise the bar and add automation, scripting and AI and Machine Learning to your toolbelt?
This guest blog is courtesy of Atera. Read more guest blogs from Atera here. Regularly contributed guest blogs are part of ChannelE2E’s sponsorship program.
