As the AI revolution and evolution continue to accelerate apace, the nascent technology's business users are gradually adjusting to leveraging it in their daily workflows and uncovering new and exciting use cases that enhance their productivity and collaboration.
However, all these novel possibilities inevitably create fresh challenges, including how to maintain, manage, and oversee organisational AI use so that it's effective, compliant, and maximises the return on investment. As a result, there will be growing market demand for solutions that support admins and managers in monitoring organisational AI to fulfil those aforementioned goals.
That is where Microsoft Teams management and monitoring specialist Martello and its enhanced Vantage DX platform have stepped in, delivering what the company describes as an "industry first" Microsoft Copilot 365 user experience management solution for enterprises.
"One of the things we are seeing happening in the market with the adoption of Copilot and also with our own customers is that they are purchasing and investing in AI," Randah McKinnie, VP of Product at Martello, told UC Today. "They're investing in the Microsoft solution if they're already using that platform."
"But interestingly, we actually did a little bit of research when we saw that statistic. We looked at what our customers were doing, and we have access to their Microsoft license information. So we can actually see that across our customer base, while they had purchased a large number of licenses, only about a third of those licenses had yet been assigned to users. So, to me, that really reinforced the fact that they're still trying to figure out how to do this."
Spotting An Opportunity
McKinnie's "main purpose" in her role is "to really look at the value that our products are driving out into our customer base and then make sure that we're meeting the need, that we're coming up with things both that the customer is looking for, that the market is looking for, and that can also help us, of course, grow a successful business".
That focuses on Teams but also monitoring across all of Office 365 and many other impacts occurring across that ecosystem.
McKinnie and her team identified the opportunity to create hugely valuable features that inform and guide customers "still trying to figure out how to do this".
"You generally see that almost all of those Microsoft licenses that have been purchased have been assigned, and particularly, Copilot licenses, which are expensive," McKinnie elaborated. "So why would an organisation just be sitting on them?"
"Organisations are still trying to figure out how to use it," McKinnie said. "So, while we're not the ones that are working with the end users on how they're using the solution, we know that one of the things, in order to have them engage with it, is that they're going to need to have a good experience with it. What we can do is help with the IT deployments and employee engagement departments and make sure that we're getting rid of any roadblocks to having customers engage with them."
"That would include reliability, speed of performance, and anything we could do to help them ensure that their networks are configured to support whatever additional capacity the communications require," McKinnie continued. "I think what's interesting is that when we released this, it was not like we had a lot of customers asking for it. That's always what happens when you're kind of new on the cutting edge of something, right?"
Martello aimed to get something to market as quickly as possible to enable the customer to monitor what's happening when they deploy Copilot and encourage engagement. This meant having something already there for them so they wouldn't lack that need.
"If their users started to complain about, 'Well, I tried, but I couldn't actually get to the site. I tried to open the side panel in my application, or I tried to go to that Copilot page on the web, and it wasn't loading, or it wasn't available.' The IT department wouldn't be just sort of sitting there wondering, 'Now what do I do?'"
"This will give them some overtime in our monitoring tool. You can see over time the stability of the application so they'll know before the problems happen whether this is going to be a problematic application for them or not."
A Continuation Of Market Strategy
McKinnie highlighted that, while this feature set is groundbreaking in its Copilot management, it "well aligns" with Martello's "competencies" in "proactive monitoring" across the Microsoft ecosystem, which means synthetic transactions that can essentially emulate what a user is doing on the network before the user does it.
More advanced than real-time monitoring of users across a network, proactive monitoring takes the user's actions before the user does on a constant, continual basis to ensure the network is ready and capable and also shows the admin or manager if there are any hiccups that need resolving ahead of time.
"Yes, we can also provide that capability in a way that supports AI," McKinnie affirmed. "Again, people are not talking about how AI is going to tax our networks, but we're certainly talking about compute power. That compute power has to fill the data that's happening with it while it's a separate tax on your systems. There's still going to be a lot of back-and-forth traffic, nodes, and everything else, so we want to be there to see what happens, and we want to be able to take care of things as they emerge."
