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.

Your support data is in ClickHouse. Altor queries it automatically.

When a ticket arrives, Altor runs the ClickHouse queries your engineers would write - error rates by customer, latency percentiles, failed request patterns - and delivers the diagnosis before your agent finishes reading the ticket.

What Altor queries in ClickHouse

Altor generates and executes targeted ClickHouse queries for each ticket, pulling exactly the data needed to diagnose the reported issue:

•Request logs - error rates, status codes, response times by customer_id and endpoint over the relevant time window
•system.query_log - slow queries, resource-intensive operations affecting the reporting customer
•Custom event tables - whatever usage or behavioral data your product tracks per customer
•Ingestion and pipeline tables - for data infrastructure products reporting missing or delayed data
•Billing and usage tables - metered consumption reconciled against invoice line items

200+

tickets diagnosed via ClickHouse queries at Portkey

< 2 min

from ticket to ClickHouse-backed diagnosis

5-10

ClickHouse queries typically needed per investigation

queries your support team writes manually

"Our tickets are investigations, not FAQs. Nobody else could even attempt to answer them automatically. Altor can because it queries our actual production data."
— Engineering lead, Portkey

How the ClickHouse integration works

Setup takes under 30 minutes. Altor connects to your ClickHouse instance with read-only credentials, learns your schema, and begins querying on the first ticket.

You control which tables Altor can access. Most teams grant access to request logs, error tables, and usage data - keeping payment and PII tables off-limits.

Altor for ClickHouse teams API error investigation Portkey case study

See Altor query your ClickHouse during a live ticket

We connect to your ClickHouse instance and diagnose a real ticket in 2 minutes. US hours.

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