Mosyle brings generative AI to Apple mobile device management

Apple might not be directly bringing the power of generative AI to its hardware platform, but that isn’t stopping other vendors from doing it.

Today, mobile device management (MDM) vendor Mosyle announced a new generative AI approach to help organizations more easily manage, secure and enable compliance for Apple macOS-powered hardware. The new release is part of an update to the Mosyle Apple Unified Platform, which became generally available in May 2022, alongside a massive $196 million funding round for the company. The Mosyle Apple Unified Platform combines MDM with endpoint security to help organizations deploy and manage Apple devices. 

One of the primary ways that enterprise administrators can manage Apple devices is with advanced scripts. These scripts are often complex. They can help identify different usage or deployment characteristics for a given device. For example, a script can be written to identify if a device has encountered a specific WiFi access point. To date, the process of script creation has been the domain of experts, but that’s now changing, thanks in no small part to the power of generative AI.

“The idea here is really to help customers have access to that very specific layer of Mac management that is scripting,” Mosyle CEO Alcyr Araujo told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “We see Mac admins reach the highest level when they can really take advantage of scripting, where they can basically automate anything on the fleet.”

How Mosyle AIScript automates Apple management

The path toward generative AI for Mosyle was not a straight line.

Araujo explained that his team had been working on developing a script catalog, to help make it easier for users to find and select the right scripts to automate MDM functions. Not coincidentally, Mosyle Script Catalog is a new feature that is also part of the company’s latest platform update.

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Then ChatGPT happened in late 2022 and every technology vendor (and nearly every user) was suddenly aware of the power of generative AI. Araujo recounted that he started testing gen AI with ChatGPT tooling for Mosyle’s own internal needs first, to potentially make support more efficient by finding answers quicker. 

In addition to being the CEO of Mosyle, Araujo is the company’s IT administrator. One day he was looking to create a specific script that was needed for macOS. That need led to the revelation that by combining gen AI with the script catalog project, a user could use natural language queries to rapidly find, or even create, a script to execute a specific task.

OpenAI is under the hood, with more generative AI support to come

The first release of Mosyle AIscript relies on OpenAI’s GPT models. But Araujo emphasized that his goal is to have an open approach, where multiple large language models (LLMs) for gen AI could be chosen.

Mosyle isn’t simply connecting OpenAI’s API to its own MDM technology. Araujo explained that numerous steps taken on the Mosyle side help ensure privacy of user data as well as accuracy of the generated script output.

Araujo explained that with Mosyle AIScript, the system first attempts to understand what a user query for a script really means. If needed, Mosyle then adds elements to better define the script to get the desired output. On top of that, Mosyle validates the generated script to make sure that it will run as expected on Apple hardware.

“There is a lot of polishing there in terms of making sure we’re guiding the requests in the correct way and understanding the result before showing it to the customer,” he said.

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