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.

Handle Time

Handle time is the total elapsed time from when an agent opens a ticket to when they close it, including all active work, hold periods, and transfers. It represents the end-to-end ticket lifecycle from the agent's perspective rather than just the average across many tickets.

Why it matters for B2B support

Handle time in B2B technical support averages 45–90 minutes for P2 tickets that require investigation. The distribution is highly skewed: about 60% of tickets close in under 20 minutes, but roughly 15% take more than 3 hours and consume around 40% of total agent time. Those long-tail tickets are the main source of SLA risk and burnout, and they almost always require querying 3 or more systems such as ClickHouse, Zendesk history, billing platforms, or bug trackers. Every additional system touched adds roughly 12–18 minutes to handle time, which is why multi-system automation matters so much.

Key benchmarks

45–90 min

average handle time for P2 tickets requiring investigation in B2B SaaS support

40%

of total agent-time consumed by the 15% of tickets that take 3+ hours

12–18 min

time added per additional system that must be queried during investigation

2 min

Altor investigation time replacing 45-minute manual diagnosis — eliminates the long tail

How Altor helps

Altor collapses the multi-system investigation step that creates the long tail in handle time. By gathering evidence across systems in minutes, it shortens the hardest tickets instead of only optimizing the easy ones.

FAQ

How is handle time different from average handle time?

Handle time refers to the elapsed effort on an individual ticket. Average handle time rolls that across many tickets into one benchmark used for planning and performance analysis.

Why do a small number of tickets consume so much handle time?

Because the longest tickets usually require cross-system diagnosis, multiple internal checks, and repeated context rebuilding. Those long-tail cases dominate labor cost even when they are a minority of total volume.

See Altor investigate a real ticket

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

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