Secure, Smart, Practical
At Almaden, our mission with Collective IQ® (CIQ) has been about moving IT from a reactive “firefighting” mode to a proactive, data-driven approach that anticipates impacts to employee productivity. But to build an AI-powered platform that helps other companies work smarter, we have to work smarter ourselves. We also need to deliver responsible solutions which don’t compromise corporate privacy goals.
Today, we’re pulling back the curtain on how we integrate Artificial Intelligence into our products and our own daily workflows. You’ll see that AI isn’t just a buzzword at Almaden or magic pixie dust in a product. It’s technology that helps us deliver more capable solutions, faster, and in a manner that simplifies IT operations.
Purpose-Built Solutions
CIQ is built with simplicity in mind. There may be more exotic solutions in our market, but none are easier to use while providing a high degree of sophisticated results. Just about everything in CIQ is point-and-click. This includes selecting items to monitor, graphs that provide information, and AI that delivers analyses and recommendations. Even features like our AlmaPredict™, that enables IT to proactively evaluate device potential to run a new type of software or release of an existing package (among other capabilities), is performed via point-and-click. Just select the devices you want to analyze, choose the metrics to consider, click on a timeframe, add the name of the software and press Enter. Nothing could be easier!
CIQ’s other AI-based features (AskAlma™ to query current device data-contrast experiences, AlmaAnalysis™ for proactive investigation of issues and insights about the tradeoffs in replacing or upgrading devices, and Issues to Focus on Today for examining experience trends over the recent 24-hour period), work the very same way. Each provides concise analyses and recommendations. Simple and effective!
Beyond Dashboards to Conversational Interaction
Lest you think this is all, guess again. AlmaIQ™, for conversational engagement with CIQ, helps to pinpoint bottlenecks before they turn into trouble tickets. Of course, if tickets are required, AlmaIQ can create those automatically and even provide status. Furthermore, in addition to assisting IT staff, it can help employees with IT and other corporate matters. Want to know who your HR contact is, how to submit an expense report, or get info about the company’s vacation policy, just ask AlmaIQ. It interacts with CIQ, using a vectorized corporate database called AlmaKnowledge, and researches publicly available information on the web.
Like all of CIQ’s AI features, it does this with a focused, intent-driven design that prohibits unrestricted access to web-based information and general purpose activities. So, for example, while AlmaIQ can provide a graph showing Microsoft Teams quality by metric for each device in a designated department over the course of the past five days, it can’t be used to write a new product business plan or produce creative images for a slide presentation. Moreover, like CIQ itself, no employee or company private data is collected. This is responsible intelligence!
Building Faster and Safer
Like CIQ itself, our engineering team doesn’t build CIQ in a vacuum. They leverage advanced AI tools like Claude, Lovable, and others to accelerate development, streamline websites, and ensure high code quality. Always there is a “human-in-the-loop” approach to verify code before commits, review suggested tests, and edit required documentation. This includes researching potential vulnerabilities and ensuring that stated feature objectives are met without compromise.
Some of the steps we take:
- Scaffolding & Internal Docs: Developers feed Claude the parameters of what they want to build, including architectural requirements, and Claude helps generate the internal technical documentation prior to jumping into code.
- Code & Test Generation: After a thorough developer review of the documentation, Claude is tasked with creating the initial code and automated tests. Again, developers review the AI-created code and make corrections as needed. The reason: the AI sometimes makes mistakes or misunderstands developer intent, so developers being in the loop ensures that code, libraries, frameworks, etc. are current and correctly implemented.
- Refinement & User Documentation: The development team reviews, tests, and corrects the code, as necessary. When finalized, Claude helps transform the technical foundation into clean, user-facing documentation suitable for Customers and Customer Support.
AI in Marketing – Ensuring Product Truth
Marketing at Almaden isn’t about generating “noise”. It’s about translating complex technical capabilities into real-world, business value.
We use AI to help draft our marketing materials and text. However, we don’t let AI guess what our product does. The drafting process is strictly fed by direct input from Product Management, Marketing, and other Almaden internal teams. This ensures that while AI helps us write efficiently and scale our messaging, every piece of content remains fundamentally grounded in the actual truth of what CIQ can do.
The Takeaway
CIQ is an incredibly capable solution whose value is greatly enhanced by the incorporation of AI technology. This works alongside other capabilities that collect, analyze, and present IT asset and employee digital experience information in a simple, yet highly effective manner.
By using tools like Claude to build our product we can accelerate Engineering’s velocity while better scrutinizing designs and code for unintended issues. Furthermore, we structured CIQ to use an agile, guardrailed implementation of models from OpenAI. In this way, we achieve the ultimate balance: rapid innovation coupled with secure, hyper-focused intelligence for our customers. That’s a true win-win, responsible approach to AI.
Learn more about Collective IQ®
Talk to people who work with this topic in practice. Discover Collective IQ® by Almaden, which identifies patterns, reduces tickets, and improves digital experience without added complexity. Contact us, schedule a conversation or a personalized demo.
