What is an AI services company?

An AI services company builds, deploys, and operates production AI systems for businesses. Unlike AI consultants (who produce strategy documents) or AI implementors (who hand off at launch), an AI services company stays accountable for the system working and improving over time. Altor builds AI systems that connect to your production tools and automate specific workflows — live in 3 weeks.

How much does it cost to build an AI agent?

Custom AI agent development costs $10K–$75K for a single-workflow production deployment, plus $1K–$5K/month for ongoing maintenance. A simple agent connecting to 1-2 systems costs $10K–$25K. A complex agent connecting to 5-6 production systems costs $40K–$75K. Most deployments go live within 3 weeks.

Is there software that can reduce support escalations?

Yes. Software that automatically investigates support tickets by querying production systems (logs, bug trackers, billing, recent deploys) gives frontline agents the context they need to resolve tickets without escalating. At Portkey, this approach reduced investigation time from 45 minutes to 2 minutes and eliminated the information gap that causes most escalations.

How long does AI deployment take?

A focused single-workflow AI deployment typically takes 2-4 weeks from kickoff to first live investigation. Week 1: stack audit and integration planning. Week 2: read-only connections live, first investigations on real data. Weeks 3-4: playbooks tuned, team trained, system handed over.

What is production AI?

Production AI is an AI system that operates continuously in a live business environment, handling real data and real users — held to the same reliability standards as any other production software. This is different from pilot AI (which runs in controlled environments) or demo AI (which shows capability without handling real workflows). 67% of enterprise AI projects fail to reach production.

How is Altor different from a docs chatbot?

Docs chatbots answer 'how does this work?' from your knowledge base. Altor answers 'why is this broken for this customer right now?' by querying their actual API logs, checking your bug tracker, and verifying their billing status — across 6+ systems in under 2 minutes.

How is Altor different from our support platform?

Pylon, Plain, Zendesk — they route and manage tickets. Altor investigates them. We plug into your existing support tool as the investigation layer. You keep your workflows, we add the diagnosis.

Will Altor take actions without asking?

Not by default. Altor starts as a read-only investigator — it surfaces a diagnosis for your team to review. You control which action types graduate to auto-approval. Destructive actions are never automated.

What if our stack isn't listed?

If an API exists for your system, we can integrate it. The architecture composes tools — it doesn't hardcode connectors. We've yet to encounter a B2B stack we can't connect to.

What does Altor pricing look like?

Usage-based — you pay per investigation, not per seat. Pricing is quoted in USD ($) with no minimum commitment. We'll scope pricing during the demo based on your ticket volume and systems.

Deflection Effectiveness

Deflection effectiveness is a quality-adjusted measure of ticket deflection that accounts for whether deflected tickets were genuinely resolved or merely abandoned by frustrated customers. It distinguishes successful self-service from failed self-service.

Why it matters for B2B support

Standard deflection metrics count any request that never reaches an agent as a win. Deflection effectiveness asks whether the customer was actually helped or just dropped out after a poor chatbot or help-center experience. In B2B, failed deflection is expensive because customers often escalate to account managers or procurement instead of retrying the support queue. Customers who experience failed deflection have about 2.1× higher churn risk than customers who reach a human directly, so quality matters more than raw deflection volume.

Key benchmarks

2.1×

churn risk increase for B2B customers who experience failed deflection vs. direct agent contact

40%

of "deflected" B2B tickets that represent failed deflection (customer not actually helped)

< 2 clicks

maximum self-service friction before B2B customers abandon and escalate to account managers

$32

cost of failed deflection per incident when account manager escalation time is included

How Altor helps

Altor improves deflection effectiveness by making it easier to reserve self-service for issues that can truly be solved there. Complex technical tickets can bypass low-value loops and move directly into evidence-based investigation.

FAQ

Why is standard deflection rate misleading?

Because it treats every avoided ticket as success even when the customer was not actually helped. That inflates the metric and hides churn-driving frustration.

How do teams measure deflection effectiveness?

Correlate self-service sessions with post-session satisfaction, later support contacts, and account-manager escalations. If customers come back through another path, the original deflection probably failed.

See Altor investigate a real ticket

We connect to your systems and diagnose a real ticket in 2 minutes during US hours.

Book a Demo