TeamViewer is targeting a more proactive approach to IT management that will see common problems solved before humans have to intervene, according to its CEO.
The remote access software firm has released a series of AI-powered tools in the past year, including TeamViewer Intelligence , which summarizes support tickets for IT staff and generates automatic fixes for common issues.
Elsewhere, TeamViewer DEX monitors enterprise devices in real time to identify and fix IT issues before they have a negative impact.
This tool is also capable of searching historical enterprise data to investigate IT issues, such as connecting the dots between software crashes and a recent update roll-out, or flagging if seemingly anomalous tickets point to more widespread issues that have yet to rear their head.
To expand the usefulness of its solution, the company has turned to partners such as Salesforce. As part of the sharpened focus, TeamViewer DEX and TeamViewer Intelligence will integrate directly with Salesforce’s AI agent platform Agentforce, in order to streamline IT resolution workflows.
Oliver Steil, CEO at TeamViewer, spoke to ITPro about how this offering reduces the age-old burden of support tickets on IT staff.
“[I]f a user is registering, so to say, the devices to that Salesforce offering, then automatically you can deploy this proactive capability, which I call TeamViewer DEX, it will be part of the Salesforce platform, it will be seamless,”
“It will be run on every device, every managed registered device it will run, and therefore you get the full benefit of these capabilities for those devices from the Salesforce platform.”
TeamViewer acquired the digital employee experience (DEX) firm 1E earlier this year, for an agreed sum of $720 million. In bundling these features into the TeamViewer platform and pairing them with its internal AI models, the firm has sought to greatly improve workflows for solving IT issues.
TeamViewer is doubling down on Salesforce ties
It’s clear in our conversation with Steil that TeamViewer’s partnership with Salesforce is a key way the company aims to reach IT admins, by bringing its functionality to platforms they’re already accustomed to using.
“When we were discussing with Salesforce how we can elevate the partnership that we’ve had for years now, we got to learn that they are making a very active move into IT service management,” Steil said.
TeamViewer realized that integrating its proactive IT management offering within Salesforce could dramatically improve user experience, Steil told ITPro, with the partnership enabling more autonomous IT monitoring and user resolution.
Within TeamViewer’s existing monitoring, IT admins can monitor management, issue resolution, and configuration from a centralized dashboard and produce AI-driven summaries of recurring incidents.
Its own AI solutions can then generate code for an automatic fix to common problems, Steil explained.
“So if we've seen that person X had an issue in a printer installation in an office environment, maybe, then an IT expert had connected to this computer, solved the issue through settings changes. We capture this and we can write an automation that in the next incident, when it happens, when somebody else comes and wants to install the same printer, that this potential issue before it occurs is actually resolved and remediated.”
Each step of this process requires automation, Steil added, with automatic inspection of sessions paired with AI-generated code and AI systems used to pick between the 3,000-odd automations that are available within the platform to solve the issue.
This is an opt-in feature and Steil stressed that TeamViewer checks in with customers to ensure they would like the platform to inspect and summarize their sessions.
OT devices are in the crosshairs for TeamViewer
Going forward, TeamViewer is seeking a “large number” of its 650,000 paying customers to opt-in to its AI platform, Steil said, as it looks to further integrate workflows and expand its AI partnerships.
He added that OT devices are a very important part of TeamViewer’s offering, including machines in operational environments, vending machines, and retail point of sale (POS) terminals.
“We really want to extend that capability of proactive issue resolution, proactive IT management, into this area,” he told ITPro.
“We have use cases, very nice uses, for example, boarding card readers, boarding card scanners at a gate. [It’s] very important to know that they are up and running and if they're not, then remediate this. Because if you have the situation where the flight is boarding and then the scanner doesn't work, it's creates friction, significant friction, so we want to avoid that.”
Other examples include production, warehousing, logistics, Steil added.
“We really want to bring that notion of proactive management to those devices as well, because they are operationally incredibly important,” he said.
“So they’re big value drivers – you can argue making knowledge workers happy using their IT is very, very important in banking, insurance, financial services, government. But if you think about operations, the disruption that you create with non-properly-working devices is often even bigger, because often it affects even more customers and it’s not so easy to fix.”
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