What comes after AIOps? Atera says it’s AI powered IT (AIT)

The concept of AIOps, that is using AI to help optimize IT operations is not a new one and predates the modern era of generative AI

Generative AI can bring more capabilities to IT operations, according to IT management platform vendor Atera, which today is announcing its new AI-powered IT (AIT) platform. Back in January, Atera began to integrate generative AI into its platform, to help enable its users to more easily write IT automation and operations scripts.

Now the company is going significantly further, partnering with Microsoft and deeply integrating with the Azure OpenAI service to go beyond scripts and help bring IT operations to a new level of AI powered automation.

The new Atera AI-powered capabilities include Autopilot, Copilot, and the Toolbox functionality. Autopilot aims to automatically fix IT issues through AI before they escalate to a human. Copilot provides AI powered generated actions and answers to help IT solve issues, while Toolbox provides AI tools for specific IT operations tasks.

“We went all in with AI and we’ve changed the product,”Gil Pekelman, CEO of Atera, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “In a sense, we’ve changed the way IT is done through AI.”

How Atera is moving beyond AIops with generative AI

Atera has been developing a remote IT operations and management platform since 2011, building out its own set of capabilities and knowledge base for IT.

The addition of generative AI moves Atera beyond processes that always require human interaction, to more automated capabilities that can help IT teams and their users to more rapidly solve issues.

Pekelman explained that now with Atera’s AIT platform, the autopilot capabilities can help to solve issues. For example, among the most common types of complaints that IT users will often have is that their internet connection is slow. In that case, Atera can automatically run a series of checks on the user connection, including the network interface card and system resources to identify the root cause of the issue. 

The Atera system will either come to a conclusion and then enable the user to rapidly solve it with a single click, or it will escalate the issue to a human IT operator to help solve it. The human operator will be aware of what the automated system has already attempted and then benefit from the copilot capabilities to help solve the user issue.

According to Pekelman, it is the combination of his firm’s generative AI capabilities that move Atera beyond AIOps.

“When you look at the combination of these capabilities, this is AI powered IT,” he said. “It’s not AIops, it’s not running on a lot of data and trying to make sense of it, it’s really operating it using AI.”

How Atera’s AIT platform works

Atera is using the Microsoft Azure OpenAI service to help with many of its automations, though

Atera CTO Oshri Moyal emphasized that it’s a fairly complicated setup when you dig in.

“We call it the brain, and we have many microservices combined together, it’s not just a simple API call to OpenAI,” Oshri told VentureBeat.

Some of the AI capabilities in the Atera platform were built internally, including the company’s sentiment analysis capabilities. Now Atera users when looking at a list of trouble tickets can get a visual identification of the sentiment of users about a given issue.

As the platform is trained on the specific actions that the Atera platform can enable, Oshri also claimed that the risk of any type of hallucination is very low to non-existent. Oshri noted that in the Atera use case, the technical answers are not being invented, they are being inferred from the data that the model was already trained on.

The overall goal of the Atera AIT capabilities is to increase efficiency. Pekelman estimated that the platform can increase an IT professional’s  ability to close more trouble tickets from 7 to 70 per day and reduce resolution times from hours to minutes.

“We’re giving a 10x efficiency to IT departments,” Pekelman said.