When something goes wrong, tech teams don't have the luxury of logging a support ticket. When I heard about Peritus, an AI recommendation for technical support, I felt compelled to find out more.

Robin Purohit is the co-founder and CEO of Peritus.ai, a Bay area startup that is tackling technical support for developers and engineers. He was previously a senior executive at BMC and HP Software, where he led multi-billion dollar business units for IT management, application delivery, and security.

AI chatbots for customer support are getting significant attention and investment in industries ranging from retail to financial services to employee help desks. However, an important area neglected is support for engineers and developers who are driving IT innovation.

These technical users have little patience for pre-wired chatbots without industry context and view opening a support ticket as the last resort. Instead, they look for insights from trusted experts on Community Forums, such as Stack Overflow or vendor-sponsored communities. When done well, community forums can create both user loyalty and deflect costly support cases.

Peritus, an AI recommendation engine for support automation, recently announced the results of its first IT Industry Forum Benchmark that examined over 12 million posts and responses on over 50 leading IT industry forums for vendors and open source technologies such as Cisco, MongoDB, and Kubernetes.

The benchmark study zeroed in on four key metrics:

1. The number of posts that were resolved
2. How quickly the average length to resolve each post was resolved.
3. Whether posts were resolved by the first response,
4. How many experts answered the bulk of the questions.