Apple@Work is offered exclusively by Mosyle, Apple’s only unified platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates into a single professional-level platform all the solutions needed to easily and automatically deploy, manage and protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations rely on Mosyle to get millions of Apple devices up and running effortlessly and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and see why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.
There’s no doubt that AI tools are making IT administrators faster at writing code, finding problems, etc. As a Mac administrator, I’ve noticed a slow but steady growth in how I’ve used them in my daily work across all aspects of IT. It’s not perfect, though. I’ve used it to write scripts, troubleshoot network errors, and more. A new report from Fleet puts the numbers to the problem: It’s easy to ship things, but it’s hard to undo mistakes.
About Apple@Work: Bradley Chambers has been an IT administrator at Apple since 2009. With his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, enterprise-grade WiFi, thousands of Macs, and thousands of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, share stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for IT departments.
For this report, Fleet interviewed more than 250 enterprise IT professionals who manage Apple, all of whom have administrative access to its device management systems. Survey respondents manage an average of 2,000 devices, and nearly half have 6 to 10 years of experience as Apple administrators.
Artificial intelligence is already in use
The debate over whether IT teams should use AI on a daily basis is over. They already are, and in the last 30 days, 68% of respondents reported using AI for troubleshooting or log analysis, 62% used it to write scripts, and 61% used it to create device management profiles or configurations. Log analysis is something I use AI for Often. 86% allow AI-written output into production after some form of review, and only 14% keep it out of their production environments entirely. There is simply no world in which IT can operate at the speed it needs to without AI tools.
The rollback delay
69% of respondents cannot revert a bad configuration change within an hour, and 43% need more than a day. Another 26% of respondents can recover the same day, but only manually. This is the biggest red flag of the survey, in my opinion. AI lets you ship anything fast, but AI can ship bugs just like humans can.
Here’s a real-world scenario that can happen: An IT administrator asks an AI assistant to write a configuration profile, quickly reviews it, and sends it to a few thousand Macs in a matter of seconds. If there’s something wrong (an incorrect network setting, a restriction that locks people out of an app they need), it may take a while to fix the problem.
Mac administrators are now engineers
Fleet CEO Mike McNeil said the following:
“Mac administrators are basically engineers now, whether their job description calls them that or not.”
I agree with him and I’m a little not happy about it. The job of an Apple administrator has come a long way from distributing Macs and iPads to managing them through a device management console. Today it’s about identity, security, compliance, and app lifecycle, all on top of a version of macOS that forces changes every year. IT teams continue to add more and more without additional resources or subtracting things.
Thirty-one percent said keeping up with Apple’s release cadence is their biggest IT challenge, far ahead of anything else in the survey. On the bright side, Apple’s management architecture is moving in the right direction. 53% already have declarative management of devices in production.
Apple put a lot of work in here, and it’s not even Apple’s fault for the frustration. Apple created the platform for IT to do everything it needs to do. It’s everything else. Security is more difficult. Artificial intelligence has made everything more difficult. The expectation is that IT must own AI while owning literally everything else.
Wrap
IT uses AI to do its job because it is the only way to survive the onslaught of the AI era. You will not receive more help, but you will be expected to do more without having anything taken away from you. Even systems that don’t require the same day-to-day management as they did years ago still need to be owned and protected. Hosted email is a good example here. Yes, 365 and Workspace have made it easier to keep your email up and running. You’re not managing servers like you did 20 years ago, but email still isn’t easy. You’ve traded server management for AI-powered phishing scams, MFA management, and more. It’s two steps forward and one step back. We need a period of three steps forward and zero steps back to get back to where IT needs to be.
You can read Fleet’s full article on Apple in the company report on its website.
Apple@Work is offered exclusively by Mosyle, Apple’s only unified platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates into a single professional-level platform all the solutions needed to easily and automatically deploy, manage and protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations rely on Mosyle to get millions of Apple devices up and running effortlessly and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and see why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.
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