OctoAssist: what an AI-first ITSM platform looks like when it is built for a 500-seat company

If you run IT for a company of a few hundred people, you have probably looked at the big ITSM suites and walked away. The licensing assumes thousands of agents, the implementation assumes a project team, and half the modules exist for a scale you will never reach. OctoAssist is the IT Service Management platform we built for exactly that gap: everything a mid-market IT team needs in one place, with an AI layer that does the lookups so people can do the judgement.

One system for tickets, assets and patches

OctoAssist follows ITIL where ITIL helps. Incidents, service requests, problems and changes are first-class records with their own workflows, SLAs and approvals. A self-service portal lets staff raise requests, browse a knowledge base and track what they have open. Email-to-ticket turns a shared mailbox into a queue, so nothing gets lost in a thread.

The part most ticketing tools leave out is the asset side. OctoAssist ships with an asset register that is fed by a lightweight agent on every Windows and macOS device, so the CMDB is populated from the machines themselves rather than from a spreadsheet somebody promised to update. The register covers allocation and handover, lifecycle from procurement to disposal, reconciliation against what the agents actually report, and a separate track for non-IT assets such as furniture, vehicles and lab equipment. Software titles and subscriptions are inventoried too, with a digest that flags renewals before they auto-renew.

Patch management runs on the same agent: missing updates are aged, grouped into maintenance windows and deployed in bulk, with the results written back to the asset record. Remote actions let an engineer restart a service, collect logs or run an approved script on a device without a separate RMM tool.

Where the AI actually earns its keep

We are deliberately unexcited about chatbots. The AI in OctoAssist works on the data the platform already holds: it classifies and routes incoming tickets, suggests the knowledge article or past incident that looks like the current one, drafts a first response for the engineer to edit, and summarises a long ticket thread for whoever picks it up next. Every suggestion is grounded in your own records and every action is logged, so an auditor can see what the system did and why.

• Triage: category, priority and assignment group proposed on arrival, from the ticket text and the requester's asset.
• Context: the device's recent patches, software changes and open tickets are attached to the incident before an engineer opens it.
• Reporting: SLA attainment, aging, backlog and asset health as dashboards and scheduled reports, not a data-warehouse project.

The aim is not a service desk with no people. It is a service desk where people only do the work that needs a person.

Built to be run by a small team

OctoAssist is a single Python/FastAPI application with a PostgreSQL database. It runs on a Windows Server behind IIS or on a Linux VM behind nginx, on-premises or in your cloud tenancy, and it is at home in air-gapped environments where nothing may leave the building. Sign-in is through Microsoft Entra ID single sign-on with role-based access for requesters, agents and administrators. Devices enrol with a one-line installer that bakes in your server address and tenant key, and a signed MSI is available for GPO or Intune rollout. Licensing is a signed key per server, checked against our licence authority, with a grace period so a network outage never locks your help desk.

Live, not a roadmap

OctoAssist is in production at a manufacturing group in Mumbai, where it runs the service desk and an asset register of several hundred devices synchronised from Active Directory, and at a consumer brand where it serves a mixed Windows and Mac fleet. It is also the platform behind our own client support portal, OctoDesk. Those deployments shape the release cadence: the asset management module, the CSV and directory import layer and the patch windows all came from requests made by working IT teams, usually within a few weeks of being asked.

The rest of the family

OctoAssist is one of six products from Third Octopus. OctoVault backs up Microsoft 365 to storage you control. OctoFlow handles timesheets, visitors and office workflows. OctoForge is an engineer-to-order ERP for fabricators. OctoDesk is the client support portal. OctoCred manages consent under India's DPDP Act. They share a design principle: solve the mid-market version of the problem properly, price it for that size of company, and let you host it yourself.

If you would like to see OctoAssist on your own data, we can stand up a trial instance with your Entra tenant in a day. Talk to us or read the product page.