AI at Rimini Street: A Computer Weekly Downtime Upload podcast

What has happened in the last few years with artificial intelligence (AI) has happened faster than any other development in the history of computing over the last 60 years. During a podcast with Computer Weekly, Seth Ravin, CEO of Rimini Street, spoke about his enthusiasm for AI and how it is being deployed at the third-party support company to drive up efficiency by 30%.

Ravin believes AI is key to keeping businesses competitive by reducing labour costs. This is something he discussed in a recent article. In the article, Ravin talks about how labour has become a critical binding constraint — and the pressure is structural rather than cyclical. He says: “We use AI in our support operation. We don’t replace humans. We actually make our engineers better engineers, because what we’re able to do is use AI first to route customers’ cases much more accurately to the right and best source and faster.”

Thanks to the use of AI, the company is able to respond to customers in less than two minutes. “We’re only able to do that because we use technology to route the incoming calls to the right engineer, which means AI is enabling us to reduce  our time to resolution for customers by almost 30%.”

Even so, Ravin admits Rimini Street is still very much in the learning and experimental phase with AI. “We deployed Copilot to every employee in the company. People go through a phase. Like many companies we’re still in the learning phase. We’re trying to understand what we can do with this technology. Everybody hears AI, but they don’t really understand what it mean to them personally. How it will impact their lives.”

Ravin uses Microsoft Copilot and Gemini every single day. “I ask it questions and ask it to do research on information that I used to have to ask another person to do then wait a few days for an answer. Now, I literally type it in and Copilot gives me the answer and a full set of information inside of a minute.” Thanks to the references delivered along with the answer, Ravin believes Copilot is an “amazing learning tool”.

He says: “I am learning more than I ever used to because Copilot not only gives me the actual results, but it gives me context that helps me better understand the information. So I love it. I live with it every day. It’s like my best assistant now.”

Ravin notes that the fact that these AI tools let users look at the source of the information they use to provide an answer means people can make a judgment call when it comes to assessing whether the AI’s response makes sense. Extracting statistical data is a task an AI can probably do pretty well. But Ravin adds: “When it draws conclusions, we all need to learn to be a little skeptical.”

He believes people should approach AI with a healthy level of skepticism and make sure that the sources it uses to deliver an answer look reasonable.