For IT technicians, logging time entries and summarizing customer interactions are critical to profitability and quality assurance but consume valuable time and resources that could be spent helping customers. These tasks can also lead to service request response delays, creating a disconnect between customers and service desks.
Thread saw an opportunity to help IT technicians better communicate with customers. Thread designed a Service Collaboration Platform that eliminated the service ticket and enabled technicians to meet customers where they already are—in Microsoft Teams and Slack. Recognizing the streamlining power of AI technologies, Thread then turned to Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service to help automate time-draining tasks, saving technicians over an hour per day in manual data entry and other administrative duties.
Within two weeks, Thread was able to develop a new tool that utilizes the large-scale generative AI models within Azure OpenAI. This tool streamlines resourcing and service request assignments, automates time entries, and allows IT service providers to focus on what matters most—delivering incredible service to their customers.
“The barrier to entry for this technology is low ... and I think that’s why it’s so exciting. We’ve been able to utilize Azure OpenAI Service to deliver immense value to our partners extremely quickly.”
Mark Alayev, Chief Executive Officer, Thread
Mark Alayev, Chief Executive Officer
My interest in this field began when I worked at an IT service provider. In professional services such as law, accounting, and IT services, you work on a billable hour and end up spending a lot of extra time logging your hours in order to get paid. I would always forget and put in my time late. When we started Thread, we realized that by using ChatGPT in Azure OpenAI Service, we could take away the worst parts of a technician’s day, while saving their company money and improving the customer experience overall.
One way we’re doing this is by automating technician’s time entries. Currently, we’re saving them nearly an hour a day on this task alone. This is a huge win. About 80 percent of the time entries generated automatically are accepted immediately. We have engineers and technicians who no longer write their time entries themselves. This product is a unique use case, as it is highly tied to revenue and cost. Every minute we can save them on administrative overhead contributes to their profitability.
The barrier to entry is low for the technology offered in Azure OpenAI Service. I think anyone can use it and that’s why it’s so exciting. We believe that automating time entries is just the beginning of what we can do with this technology. For example, we're also seeing translation as a valuable feature for IT service providers who have teams all over the world communicating in a variety of languages. Someone who is a non-native English speaker can write in their first language and use the AI to translate it back. That’s another huge time savings and opens the door for wider collaboration across the board.
Tyler Mack, Operations Manager at WBM Technologies has told us, “Thread’s AI functionality automates time entries for us by summarizing chats in real time. This is huge and saves us 300 hours a month. We are excited about the ability to power more of our workflow with AI through the Thread and Microsoft integration."
Currently, we have about 1000 Microsoft Teams tenants integrated with our platform. This access and integration give Thread an advantage in improving operational efficiency overall. We believe generative AI will be a significant driver of innovation, and we’re aiming to be the vertical kings of IT service providing.
Matt Linn, Chief Operating Officer
Partnering with Microsoft has been a huge priority for us. We knew that combining Azure, a robust cloud solution, ChatGPT, a large language model in Azure OpenAI Service, and Microsoft Teams, a large language communication tool, was the right move for Thread.
We’ve been able to leverage the market share and multi-tenant capabilities of Microsoft Azure to offer new features for our customers. We're working on a concept called "Bring Your Own OpenAI", where our customers can easily spin up OpenAI instances on their own Azure infrastructure and integrate them into our platform.
Thread can then help them use semantic search in Azure OpenAI Service against internal documentation powered by SharePoint and other third-party tools. Technicians can quickly find sensitive and crucial information on how to handle service requests, such as change management approval and passwords— all with the security of Microsoft Azure and without any valuable data leaking to public APIs.
Bobby Jacobs, Head of Growth
We believe that Thread represents the next evolution of service requests. By integrating our platform into Microsoft Teams and Slack, Thread has created a large body of text data, including transcribed conversations and threaded messages. This knowledge provides an opportunity to leverage AI and machine learning to provide better service to customers around the world.
The combination of Microsoft Teams and Azure OpenAI Service is a game-changer. Teams captures the context and the collaborative platform, while ChatGPT mines the unstructured data. For our customers, it helps determine priorities, categories, and summaries before escalating issues.
When used together, these powerful tools give us the ability to suggest better responses and automate various parts of the technician’s workflow, leading to less busy work and more time solving problems for the customers they serve.
“The largest opportunity for years, has been to automate time entries as it’s redundant administrative work. Now, 80% of AI recommended entries are used.”
Mark Alayev, Chief Executive Officer, Thread
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