Atera Autopilot is (Almost Eerily) Live
Now generally available, the agentic, fully autonomous help desk service benefitted users in unanticipated says during beta testing.
As long as we’re discussing helpful versus harmful uses of agentic AI in managed services lately, let’s talk a little about Autopilot, managed services software vendor Atera’s fully autonomous, AI-powered help desk service. Devoted Channelholic readers first read about that product late in 2023 and got updates during its beta testing last August and this January. Last Tuesday, it became generally available.
Given all the scary possibilities I discussed in a separate post, I should probably observe here that Atera took an extremely cautious whitelist approach to safety with Autopilot in which the system can only complete tasks it’s specifically authorized to perform. So no matter how badly it might want to delete that mission-critical virtual server for some hallucinatory reason, it simply can’t, because that’s not on the whitelist.
Enough is on the whitelist, though, for Autopilot to have handled 20 to 40 percent of Level 1 tickets without any human intervention during beta testing, allowing MSPs to handle 3-5x as many tickets with the same number of technicians.
“Our partners can have more customers, they can have more endpoints, with the same team that they have today,” says Yoav Susz (pictured) Atera’s U.S. general manager, during an episode of the podcast I co-host set to go live this Friday.
In a sense, though, outcomes like that are somewhat to be expected given the nature of what Autopilot does. A lot of other lessons learned during testing were significantly less predictable and even more interesting:
End users share things with AI technicians that they won’t share with human ones. Atera has long assumed that ticket volumes would stay the same or maybe even decrease at MSPs using Autopilot. Instead, they went up, for reasons no one anticipated.
“When people knew that there wasn’t a human being on the other end that was going to judge them for their questions, they were willing to ask things that maybe they were a little bit ashamed of asking before, like how do I change the font on Google Slides,” Susz says.
End users have been inadvertently discovering capabilities in Autopilot that Atera didn’t know it has. For example, someone having trouble with an Excel error message took a screenshot and uploaded it to Autopilot for help.
“Autopilot gave them the right answer, which was really cool,” Susz says. And also surprising, because Atera didn’t know Autopilot could process visual input that way.
Autopilot learns from experience and uses what it sees to make helpful suggestions to MSPs proactively. For example, at one MSP Autopilot noticed lots of users asking for help installing Windows language packs. “It saw the behavior repeating itself again and again and again,” Susz says. So on its own initiative it wrote a script to automate language pack installation and asked the MSP for permission to use it in the future.
“That’s really, really powerful because it’s learning to behave in the same way that you are behaving,” Susz says.
AI really wants to make people happy. To a fault if you’re not careful, as OpenAI recently discovered too.
“Because it’s eager to please, we found that there were some false positives in the beginning,” Susz reports, like when users would ask Autopilot to reset their email password. “It would say, ‘absolutely.’ And then you would ask it, ‘have you reset the password?’ and it would say yes. And it hadn’t.” Atera has since fixed the issue.
End users have a tendency to anthropomorphize Autopilot. By assigning it names.
“We’ve seen people call it Billy for some reason,” Susz says by way of example. Unclear if Autopilot now answers to that name, but judging by how badly it wants to please you about password resets, I’m guessing it’s only too happy to answer to whatever name you give it.
Want to hear more unexpected insights from the Autopilot beta test?
Everything I quote Susz saying above comes from an interview on my podcast, MSP Chat. The episode featuring that conversation goes up on May 30th right here, where you’ll also find earlier episodes on AI and a host of other subjects.
