When was the last time your day got totally derailed by a seemingly minor issue—a car that wouldn’t start, a stumble on the stairs, a PC running slow? Those things you never give a second thought can wreak havoc when there’s an unexpected problem. Suddenly, you’re scrambling for a rideshare, hobbling around on a sprained ankle and missing a proposal deadline.
This blog post isn’t about how to cope with life’s unexpected daily life challenges though. It’s about how to avoid ever having to deal with them in the first place. Because what if the thing that fails—your car, your weak ankle, your PC—could just instantly fix itself, without you having to lift a finger? I can’t speak for the first two, but I can tell you that right now, the PC that heals itself is a reality that’s coming this spring to users of ProSupport Suite for PCs.
But I’m getting ahead of the story.
Present State: PC Triage, Treatment, Healing
The way the world keeps its PCs up and running has always been much like the way we keep the human body working right. Take that sprained ankle I mentioned earlier. If it’s bad enough to keep you from getting around, and your usual ice and compression aren’t doing the trick, you’re going to seek help from an expert. You’ll call your doctor’s office, or maybe head over to a minor emergency clinic. If you’re lucky, they won’t be too busy, and they’ll quickly assess and treat your injury so you can be on your way.
That’s pretty much the current model for PCs, too. If your machine is running painfully slow, and the usual restarts aren’t helping, you go to IT with your issue so you can get the problem fixed and get back to work. And just as with our sprained-ankle analogy, you hope they’re not too busy and can resolve the issue quickly. Of course, they’re hoping the same thing, because the sooner users can get back up and running, the more productive everyone—IT admins and PC users—will be.
Enter AI: Self-healing Automation for PCs
With the help of AI, the traditional triage-and-treatment model for healing PCs gives way to a more proactive approach, in which telemetry data from networked PCs can activate processes to automatically detect and resolve PC problems—before the end user even realizes anything is wrong.
Going a step further, this AI-powered self-healing can detect issues that are likely to cause problems in the future and address them across the networked environment before the problems arise. To continue with our healthcare metaphor, think of that as a vaccine against certain conditions—like a flu shot that keeps a patient from ever getting sick in the first place.
This emerging approach, made possible by AI, is all about creating an environment for PC health where persistent issues across a fleet of machines can be automatically resolved in less time and with minimal human intervention—or even no human intervention. That, in turn, leaves IT free to focus on more critical and more strategic priorities.
Coming this Spring: Self-healing Automation from Dell ProSupport Plus
I’ve been talking in metaphors and hypotheticals so far, but I’m excited to now introduce the revolutionary new real-world implementation of PC self-healing that will be a part of the Dell ProSupport Plus offering beginning this spring. That’s when ProSupport Plus customers who are connected to Dell SupportAssist AI technology can take advantage of self-healing automation to optimize PC performance and resolve a variety of PC issues—without requiring active intervention from IT and without disrupting users.
Initially, a library of IT-driven scripts will be available that AI can launch across fleets to resolve issues like blue screen errors and thermal issues. Over time, we’ll continue to refine scripts, and we can develop more scripts to further broaden the scope of these capabilities.
I’m thrilled to be part of realizing the vision of AI-powered, self-healing automation and delivering an unprecedented and ever-expanding set of capabilities for IT support. It’s going to change how IT delivers support and how users experience it—forever, and for the better. Look for more details soon.
