Logging time entries and summarising customer interactions are essential for profitability and good service, but they take up valuable time you could spend helping customers directly. These tasks can also slow down responses to service requests, creating frustration for both customers and the service desk.
Recognising a communication gap between IT technicians and customers, Thread designed a revolutionary Service Collaboration Platform. This platform ditches the traditional service ticket system, allowing technicians to connect directly with customers through their preferred channels like Microsoft Teams and Slack. Thread didn't stop there. To further boost efficiency, they leveraged the power of AI with Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service. This integration automates time-consuming tasks, freeing technicians from over an hour of daily manual data entry and administrative burdens, allowing them to focus on what truly matters – delivering exceptional customer service.
Building on their innovative Service Collaboration Platform, Thread wasted no time. Within two short weeks, they leveraged the powerful large-scale generative AI models of Microsoft Azure OpenAI to develop a groundbreaking new tool. This AI-powered solution tackles three key areas: streamlined resourcing and service request assignments, automated time entry management, and ultimately, freeing IT service providers to devote their expertise where it counts most – delivering exceptional 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 utilise 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 summarising 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.
Any administrative time that AI helps to give back to a service provider means that their work immediately becomes more profitable.
- Matt Linn, Chief Operating Officer Thread
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.