Atera Autopilot: AI Automation for MSP & End User Efficiency

Atera has provided an RMM/PSA solution to MSPs worldwide for several years. Now, it’s extending beyond traditional capabilities into next-generation agentic AI, which it says can nearly halve the low-level workload on IT teams.

IT Autopilot brings the future of ticketing and resolution into the hands of MSPs

Atera’s IT Autopilot is the most recent of its solutions to hit the market. Announced earlier this year, the offering expands on Atera’s PSA/RMM capabilities by leveraging agentic AI to intake, ticket, and even remediate issues.

To CEO and co-founder Gil Pekeman, the automated ticketing system is more than just a product: it’s the culmination of nearly a decade of work.

“We always had the vision that we have a lot of the problems teams experience on the one hand, and the data on the solutions for those problems on the other,” Pekeman said. 

Atera launched its PSA/RMM solution in 2018, and Pekeman says the company has been focused on unlocking value through AI since before it even had a product on the market.

“We didn’t have a single customer yet, and we were already thinking about AI,” Pekeman said. “Then Microsoft and OpenAI came to us and showed us the thing they were calling ChatGPT, like three months before it went public, and we shifted everything to working with, at the time, GPT-3 and really focusing on how we could use AI.”

Pekeman describes IT Autopilot as a multi-agentic platform that behaves similarly to an IT technician, providing instant support to users who can prompt the agent from within email or digital communications channels, including Teams, Slack, and others.

The agentic models are trained on and operate within only the parameters that MSPs and their clients allow, Pekeman says, meaning that Autopilot can handle end-to-end remediation only when system controls permit it.

The agent processes intake and creates ticketing for all issues a user reports within seconds. It then scans what it can access to either recommend a diagnosis and fix to a human technician or to itself. It can then remediate issues if the partner allows the system to perform those tasks independently.

Cutting MSP workloads up to 40% with AI automation

Atera claims to have measured a 40 percent reduction in the overall manual load an MSP team faces due to the extent to which Autopilot can address and remediate issues without human intervention.

“It’s a 24/7/365 personal technician for every user in a company to go to,” Pekeman said. “MSPs with a thousand endpoints, for example, save millions of dollars in time spent on routine tasks. These are repeatable and mundane tasks that people, frankly, hate to do. We liberate IT technicians from those and let them flourish in other areas of the business.”

MSPs, Pekeman says, can see the benefits in their own teams as well as with their end users. Because IT Autopilot operates alongside Atera’s already popular PSA/RMM tooling, the new capabilities are, in some ways, just the next evolution of what they are already using for their operations.

Atera’s US General Manager, Yoav Susz, explained to us back in April, before Autopilot was launched, how its MSP partners are seeing real value through AI-enabled automation.

“I’ve heard our COO say internally that we’re automating 25% of tickets, but we’re solving 100% of the tickets technicians hate working on, and that feels like a great summary of how helpful this technology is,” Susz said at the time.

Scaling MSP services with PSA/RMM and AI: Why D&H uses Atera in its services operation

Sam Coyl owned and ran MSPs for most of his career before joining distribution giant D&H three years ago. There, he helps lead the build-out and management of D&H’s professional and managed services offerings for its partners, who leverage the distributor for services they can’t provide to clients internally.

“We went through the process of evaluating PSA tools, and of course we included in that the household names every MSP knows, but I also wanted to open that discovery up to some of the newcomers to the market,” Coyl said. “Ultimately, I’m glad we did that, because that’s how we discovered Atera and they become the best choice for us.”

Coyl, like all MSPs themselves, says his team relies on the PSA/RMM as the backbone of the services operation. To him, utilizing Atera’s tooling opens D&H up to emerging technologies like AI while still providing the integrations and functionality needed to provide services to partners efficiently and at scale.

“We add 700 clients to the platform a month. Atera’s ease of use and the pricing model are crucial to us,” Coyl said. “We have been able to build a scalable model that allows us to grow, and with the integrated RMM, what MSPs need from the solution is already there.”

Coyl echoes Atera’s leadership in praising the use of automation to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks, noting that the company’s AI helps them flag commonalities across tickets to create knowledge base articles and other resources for routine support projects.

“We’re also able to embrace new technology and better leverage our data. Ultimately, Atera’s built to listen to feedback, adapt, and it means we aren’t stagnant,” Coyl continued. 

What’s next for Atera’s AI Autopilot vision

Pekeman says the journey to this point has been almost unbelievable, but that doesn’t mean he has any plans to slow down or rest on the laurels Atera has earned so far. His ultimate goal goes far beyond any one product or solution.

“We’re dreaming big, and we have the dream that what we’re doing is going to eliminate IT friction from the world,” Pekeman said. “Once you remove IT friction, innovation can happen, and your employee engagement improves. It’s going to have massive effects for the world’s GDPR, too, as organizations waste less time and money on IT issues.”

Cleansing the world of its IT problems is certainly not a short-term plan, but it’s clear that Pekeman leads the company with an eye to the future. In the meantime, the business seems poised to capitalize on shifting channel demands and providing an alternative to legacy players in the PSA/RMM space.