What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Telecom/5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
Revolutionizing IT Service Management: SysAid's AI Integration, No-Code Solutions, and Strategic Insights
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What if you could revolutionize your IT service management with just a few clicks? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Avi, a visionary in IT service management, as we explore the cutting-edge integration of generative AI. With over two decades of tech experience, including founding a machine learning company and leading at LivePerson, Avi shares his compelling journey to SysAid, where AI-driven solutions are transforming ticket categorization, routing, and response generation. Discover how SysAid’s intuitive platform not only boosts efficiency but also frees IT teams to concentrate on strategic initiatives.
In this episode, we spotlight the practical impacts of AI in ITSM, underscoring the ease of implementing no-code solutions and the significant reduction in human workload. Listen to firsthand testimonials from satisfied clients and understand the transformative power of AI in generating natural language responses and automating code generation. We also delve into strategic insights for mid-market enterprises, particularly in sectors like healthcare and government, highlighting SysAid's innovative culture and approach to AI transparency and human oversight. Don't miss out on these invaluable insights for standing out in today's competitive IT service management landscape.
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Hey everyone. Fascinating chat today as we dive into the world of IT service management with a true innovator in the field, suseid Avi. How are you?
Speaker 2:Doing well. Doing well Not bad at all.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks for being here, Really fascinated by the work you and the team are doing driving this next generation wave of IT service management. Before that, maybe share a bit about your professional background, what brought you to SysAid and the mission of the team.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure. So how can you take 20 plus years of high tech and career? I will say I wrote Java code in 1998. That's how I started my career as a tech person and I remember somewhere a few years in my career I entered the door to the CEO and I said you know what I can do, that I can do that I can open our branch in New York, et cetera. And I remember he looked at me. I said you know what I can do, that I can do that I can open our branch in New York, et cetera. And I remember he looked at me and said who are you? And at that moment I felt there was a misalignment between what I think I can do and what the world sees me.
Speaker 2:And from there I took a founder journey, started a company that built machine learning technology PurePlay in the days where you didn't pay two cents, call it an API, but you had to build it fully through MATLAB and write it in Java for predictive modeling. And then, seven years after, this company was acquired by LivePerson and I spent about 11 years as an executive at LivePerson, where a lot of my work was around product and leading to transformational to conversational AI, which is relevant also to our topic here, and about a year and a half ago I joined CSAID, which is a service management company focusing on IT service management. It's about a 20-year-old company, amazing company, and when people ask me, why did you join? Why did you select to do that? Because my plans were to open another startup, I said that it's an incredible company with a very solid few thousands of clients running in 100 plus countries in the world, and service management didn't go through an AI revolution. Combine it with generative AI.
Speaker 2:I felt there was a massive opportunity. Now, for those on the call that are curious but have zero knowledge on service management, I would say every company buys a service management solution. Itsm, it service management is that ticketing system where you have VPN issues or your computer is slow or you need a Salesforce license or anything on your mind onboarding employees, offboarding employees, network issues and this is the system that connects IT to you to help you. So it's a massive market because almost any company in the globe that has more than 10 people would buy a system like that.
Speaker 1:That's a huge market, huge opportunity. Let's watch a video of yours from your website to give us a peek into how it works in action. Let's take a look.
Speaker 3:Sure, if you're an IT manager dealing with tickets, you must try SysAid. Sysaid is an ITSM platform to manage and simplify the entire IT service management process. It has everything an IT manager needs Asset management, workflow automation, comprehensive third-party integrations, advanced customization with low code, service level management and more. Let me show you an example. When an employee submits a ticket, it can sometimes be challenging to understand the issue, especially in a company with 700 employees where everyone uses their own wording. But SysAid automatically categorizes tickets and routes them to the right person, summarizes ticket content in real time, analyzes end user emotions and even rephrases replies on your behalf.
Speaker 3:I don't even touch the keyboard. Look at that. Less than 10 seconds, boom, you're done. Whether it's password resets, access issues, application support needs or network connectivity issues, sysaid directly understands the issues from the ticket queue, helping me reduce repetitive tickets, automate tasks and free up time for actual work. It makes system changes independently, with no coding or bringing in experts to make changes. It has robust analytics, which was super important to the CIO, and the best part is it was so easy to implement. Before SysAid, we were limited in resources and really struggling to deliver within SLA, but now SysAid helped us decrease MTTR by 70%, improve CSAT and allow my team to focus on what we love in IT tackling more strategic tasks and high-value projects. Seriously, if you're an IT manager, wow, that is very impressive.
Speaker 1:It's almost magical. Maybe describe what's happening behind the scenes to enable all of that.
Speaker 2:Goodness Sure enable all of that? Goodness, sure. So ITSM is like a candy store to generative AI, because when you think about AI, if you have enough data and you have access to do all the actions needed and you have a way to get fresh data, always right, you can build an AI-contained environment. It means that you can understand the issue, solve it, report on it, monitor it, et cetera. And that's what we've built. We basically took our years of technology that we built, which is the core ITSM use cases ticketing, knowledge base, self-service portal, workflows, automations and more and more email rules and we built a layer of infrastructure on top of it, and this layer of infrastructure is basically a way for the generative AI to use it in real time to help you as an employee or as an agent. And we'll keep evolving it to the next level.
Speaker 2:So let's say you wake up in the morning and you come to your office in London and it's freezing outside and you come in and the heater doesn't work. You open a ticket. Something is wrong here. It's freezing. Some IT person comes in, sees it and writes an answer. We want it. Probably. It's about an hour or two. It will be fixed. Stay warm Two minutes after People, other people come in. What do they do? They also open a ticket. By that time, after two minutes already, the next one will be answered by AI. The AI understands something is going on, also understand. This is not an issue from yesterday. This is an issue that's live now, right, and you don't want the AI to answer from an issue two years ago and just will reply. This will be resolved in about an hour. Stay warm, enjoy.
Speaker 2:But it doesn't copy. It's not like the old NLU years, the natural language processing few years ago. The generative AI understands the situation and generates an answer to you. So that's what the new world looks like. Same goes for what I explained to the other side, where people are understaffed. It's very hard to be an employee today and to be successful. You know what I mean. Everybody joins companies and they really want to be successful and be promoted and sometimes they fail, not because they're not good. They fail because it's hard to be a successful employee or even a successful manager, to get data, to get access, to know what to do, and generative AI plays a big role here. Think about me as an agent. It's my first month here and then I have an issue. I need to help someone else. How do I find a ticket that is two years ago? How do I know it's relevant? How do I know it's not obsolete? How do I know how to answer? And the AI does it for me.
Speaker 1:So I think this is where the layer that we've built is pushing forward the frontiers of how employees will experience Well it's fantastic and the user interface looks really intuitive, so different from what I remember working at big companies I worked at Oracle and Intel and Philips and many, many years ago I've never seen anything like this. How do you think about the workflow and you know these are very complex environments how do you customize and tailor this sort of platform per customer?
Speaker 2:It's a very good question. I think that to answer it, first we have to talk where ECC focuses right. We do not compete with ServiceNow, which is the gorilla in the market. We do not compete with it on these multimillion dollar accounts or serving, you know, 50 or 200,000 employees companies. We compete in the mid market, low enterprise. Well, these companies, usually they do not want to code, right, they want to have that option, but they want a no code solution. So the way we do it is that all of your customization are available with no code, by drag and drop and by allowing you to get the value in a way that no developers are in the middle. As for the AI, it's truly no code. It's a checkbox to enable. It's a checkbox to enable and from that moment, it takes all your history and it starts moving forward with it and it allows a way for you to start serving your agents and your end users by AI in a conversational manner, just like the video we've seen.
Speaker 1:That's fantastic and I understand you're not a service now. But any new solution in the enterprise, you know, does require some effort to implement. Maybe you can talk about the implementation process. You know how long does it take. You know what's some of the real world impacts and benefits, roi that you're seeing with real customers, and you have quite a few. It's a very impressive list of clients here um.
Speaker 2:So I would say a lot of it is around um, connecting you to, uh, the emails that you have today, right, and all the systems that you have today as a company, and providing that service. Typically it's between I would call it two to four weeks. You'll be up and running even if you have a complex environment, because we, like I said, it's a no-code, so our team will help you or you'll do it alone and that will provide for your way to come in, but typically it's a two to four weeks implementation. Some clients that are much, much bigger may take one month, month and a half, but no more than that. But it's not a heavy resource. I will say something that's interesting. The ROI we see, especially around AI, is deflection of about 35% to 40% of the volume. Human being would have to take care Wow, yes. And it is including also a lot of time freed for the agents themselves that now can do more strategic work. And, like I said, genai for ITSM is like a candy store. There's almost no limit to what you can do. And I want to say another thing that's related to Gen AI. Gen AI brings also a way for the system to generate code right, not only to orchestrate the right English or an answer.
Speaker 2:So, when you think about it, what did you do a year ago, two years ago, when you wanted to integrate between a system like SysAid and, for example, an HR system like Workday? You went in, you took a developer, or you paid for a PS project, or, if the integration wouldn't be ready for you, and you start to code it, you call the api of workday and you connect it to the api of c-said. Right today, you can go in and just say in a language you say here's the url for the api for workday, here's the url for the api for c-said. Please write a code that connects between them and make sure that every time in workday there's a new employee, things will start happening and and service record will be created with this workflow for that employee, et cetera, et cetera. And you click a button and in like a few seconds minutes, you have a base to start working on.
Speaker 2:Right, this is a future where we live today. Right, this is a future where we live today. So the future has arrived and the impact on it is not only by providing value in a matter of days versus months. It's also things that you wouldn't go into and you would suffer from them. Now are not a big pain, and transitioning between platforms is easier than it was in the past. Not a big pain, and transitioning between platform is is easier than it was in the past. So this is where I feel things are today and they're progressing very fast.
Speaker 1:Very fast indeed. We're seeing articles and stories every day about AI's impact, not just on the job market but on individual business and technology leaders, it leaders, system admins. How has this helped or affected their day-to-day work, job satisfaction and other elements of their kind of day-to-day business?
Speaker 2:I was last week on Wednesday In London. We did an event with clients and the event was in the Shard, which is like a big tower. I don't know if you know where it is oh of course, yeah, and we started by doing an intro.
Speaker 2:like about 25 people were in the room and we started by doing an intro. We said everybody like, just share first, like which company you are, what do you do and are you a customer or a prospect for CSAID? So after the third person, someone stood up and said I'm a customer, like three years. I've started using CSAID, copilot, the AI, four or five months ago and it's changed my life. That's how it started the event. We didn't plan it. And then the second one after him said I'm also a customer. I'm only two months changed my life.
Speaker 2:So you ask people, ask them why. And he said above all, I have now a new filter and a perspective on everything I do. That's different and it's not related to SysAid. It's related to how now I choose vendors, how I choose the systems, how I connect with my employees to do things. He said it gives me a perspective that everything I do has to be also actioned by AI. And so, if you ask me, what do I hear from clients?
Speaker 2:It's a mind shift that it creates for them that they didn't think in the past. For example, in the past, they've thought that they need to do 24-7 people as agents, and now they're feeling very comfortable that the AI will take the night right and in a case truly of emergency, there's a way to get someone that's on call or something. But it changes their thinking of how to do things. Or in the past they would say you know, I can't support my team in Paraguay because there's a barrier language, but now the AI solves it. I can support them in their local language, whether I help them by the AI self-service answering in their language. We automatically ask the AI to make sure it answers in the language that the person is talking to, but also it allows the agents that don't know that language to just recraft it and answer by the AI helping them to translate and do it correctly. So we're seeing really a lot of things. That is a mind shift for people in the industry.
Speaker 1:Well, it's wonderful. It must be very gratifying for you and the team to hear something like a product changing your life. That's not something you hear in IT, at least in a positive sense.
Speaker 2:But you know the ITSM. I'll give you some stories. That's interesting when I explain about AI and what does it mean. Well, I think things will go explain about AI and what does it mean, where I think things will go. I say, go back 20 years ago.
Speaker 2:If your kid would ask you what's the weather in the moon, you would stop. You'll feel like a proud parent. You'll go find an encyclopedia. You'll open it and then you'll find it. You'll say, oh, is this the latest version of the encyclopedia? Is this the right information? You believe so.
Speaker 2:And then you read it and you and today you've outsourced this to Google. You just tell him go Google it. By the way, you trust Google, right. And the second is that you haven't wasted 10 minutes on this. So there's, you are using AI as part of your day today. You trust AI as part of your. You trust your kids will go to talk to that AI, right? And if you take that part of their day-to-day, they'll be like where are we? What's going on here, right? So I think that ITSM this is where we're heading. Where we were a year ago is not where we're going, and people our IT here that's been the first that touched our product Today, like if we have 10 minutes of something happening and the AI is not working for them. They're like what's going on? You really want me to read the ticket.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's an amazing opportunity, and yet there are many IT service management solution providers chasing this market. Many are talking about Gen AI as well. It looks like your success is speed. It seems like you're ahead of the pack in terms of implementing Gen AI. What else? How do you see yourself differentiating yourself in this crowded marketplace?
Speaker 2:So we have a few things. One is, like I said, we're focused on the mid-market, which allows us to not fight all across all segments. There are also more segments that we think we're better at, like healthcare, industrial government and more, so we try to focus on them. A lot of our focus is on North America and UK and other markets through partners Also. It helps us on a go-to market and it's a good question. This is a big market. There's a lot of competitors. It's the good and bad on big markets. When you're alone and you have no competitors, usually you're in the wrong market. The only way to win, I think, here is just by having a great product advanced and just keep pushing it so hard, so further, that at some point the competition give up.
Speaker 2:Now I will say I have about 20 years of experience on AI through my startup and then conversational pioneering in 2012 to 2023. And I've learned the mistakes of AI. So I would say we're building AI here differently and I'm using a lot of my past failures and success to know it. And the first thing you need to know is AI will not work always, so it has to have full transparency, full, full. Any answer it gives. Anything it does has to be recorded, has to be monitored, and a human being should have the option to decide what to do. So that was number one when we built the platform. And the second is not to treat it as like hey, just grab the ticket and throw it to OpenAI, it will give you a good answer.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, no. We've invested a lot in building infrastructure and a platform. Then we can build a lot of use cases and drive it forward. So you know, ai can see something in a mile that a human being will have no chance to see and sometimes can miss something in front of it that is the size of a building that it would miss. So you have to know how to build it correctly to not make these mistakes. But we welcome the competition, but we believe we're marching forward strongly.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And if you're a mid-market enterprise in your sort of sweet spot, how do you get started? I see you even have plans directly on your website what's the deployment look like and you know, can I just go on the website and get started with a demo and more Sure.
Speaker 2:Yep. So we got a lot of materials on the website. You can do demos and interactive demos. You can also schedule a call with us. So, overall, how does it start? You connect with us. We make sure we have the right partner for you. You get access to the software. You get a quote of what's the cost of it.
Speaker 2:I'll tell you a story. I was in a meeting in that tour last week in Europe. I met one of our clients I'm not going to say the name, but it's like health clubs in London, all the UK a very known one and he said okay, I love it, let's get the AI working. I said but how much it costs? I gave him the cost. He said okay, we're buying it tomorrow. And he bought it tomorrow. I'll say why. He said you could take more. I said yeah, but I think you need AI and it's important and I don't want money to block it. I don't want this to be now a full process where it's only about do we really really need it? You got to jump on that wagon. So you ask it doesn't cost too much. It's not the extreme prices. That's how it goes. That's where we play and it's fairly easy to start working. Like I said, if you're a small business, three days you're live and you're happy.
Speaker 1:Amazing and maybe give us a peek behind the curtain in terms of the culture and the environment that you're nurturing as CEO. Start startup life is not an easy one these days, but it can be quite rewarding. Give us some visibility behind the scenes, sure.
Speaker 2:Wow, you know first, when it's your company as a founder, you may say it's not the same, like a company that you took over after 20 years. You didn't even know them, right? So is it the same founder mentality or it's a bit different? So that's the first question I ask myself. So I would say, and then, literally 24 hours after I started here, I said if I want to be successful here, I have to treat this company as if I founded it and this is part of my blood, and as if I'll do everything to make it successful at all costs, at all price. So that was decision number one. Decision number two was what's the right way to change a 20 years old company in 2025? So I said I hope this is not recorded. I said it's the Elon Musk way, just in a nicer style. That's how I answer to people. There's no time and risk usually is higher risk to maintain what you have versus to take things forward. So, and also, you've asked good, like tough questions like wow, this is a very competitive market, right? So the first value we're putting into our new like in our new culture, was we are bold as a value in what we do and how we think and how. We're okay to take risks, as long as we do what's right for our customers and our company, what's right for ourselves. So that was culture. One Number two was around AIs everywhere. Everything you do, whether you're an accountant here or you're in HR ask what AI can do to you, pick software that uses AI and drive forward things through AI. That's how. This is the lens you put.
Speaker 2:There's a few more things I would say. One of the things that is very important for me as a culture and I think people can see it is smile. Right. It's like at the end, like enjoy the journey, you know, just enjoy the journey. No place is easy, no place is perfect, and sometimes you have good people around you. Sometimes there's someone that you'd rather be in a different place, like we're living in a non-perfect life. Just when you come in and you smile, creativity and optimism will drive the company forward. There's a few more around the culture, but giving you the nuggets of what I think I'm excited about.
Speaker 1:Oh, wonderful vision and the mission's amazing. What's next for SysAid? What's upcoming in terms of the product? Any other events or meetups? Get togethers that you're and the team are looking forward to.
Speaker 2:Sure, so we do, just to close up the mission. You know, as our employees would say, our mission is to liberate organizations by putting AI to work for them and their people, not to replace their people for them and their people. And you know, we are about every two months. We do a meetup in different places in the world. I think the next one is in November in Texas, if I'm not mistaken. Great, but we have AI certificates.
Speaker 2:That is open to all level 1, level 2 of how to know how to use generative AI in the world of ITSM. We have workshops with people that want to get an environment play with AI on ITSM and just ask questions by touching it, not just by looking at someone else's demos. We have webinars. We have the next webinar next week. That will the founder, not me. The founder of CSAID is taking an hour of under the hood. How did he, plus the leading product manager on it, build the AI platform? And we have it next week, tuesday, on the 24th, whoever wants to join? So we got a lot of things that are happening. If you want to join, you can find them overall on our website always.
Speaker 1:Wow. I will definitely put those on the calendar. Congratulations on all the success and, onwards and upwards, it's a really important and worthwhile mission. Congratulations. I look forward to seeing more progress. And thanks everyone for watching Reach Out to SysAid. They put out some really great content as well. Take care, Avi. Thank you very much. Bye, everybody.