Torii announces new AI & developer capabilities

13 September 2023
5 minute read
Best practice

Torii announces new AI & developer capabilities

13 September 2023
5 minute read

SaaS management veteran Torii has announced new AI and developer capabilities.

We’ve been following Torii at ITAM Review since 2018 and have always been impressed with their platform capabilities. Torii were amongst the first providers to tackle risk aspects of SaaS Management – such as privacy and data security – and had comprehensive coverage of key SaaS applications. In 2022 we certified Torii for Enterprise SaaS Management against our open, community-sourced standard.

As SaaS matures and continues to grow in both importance and expenditure, SaaS Management platforms also need to evolve. Torii are once again leading the way with a fresh approach. The new release announced today opens the platform up for developers, power users, and partners to create workflows, automations and connectors. Torii are also the first SaaS Management company to deliver generative AI capabilities to help with time-consuming manual tasks such as contract ingestion and application identification. The AI capabilities extend to a ChatGPT-style chatbot which can answer complex natural language questions about your SaaS estate.  

Open Platform 

One of the ongoing challenges for SaaS Management Platform (SMP) providers and power users is keeping up with the sheer number of SaaS applications in the market. Whilst most SMPs provide connectors for common applications such as Microsoft 365, Zoom, Salesforce, and so on this is a time-consuming process requiring constant attention as third party APIs change. Similarly, connectivity is also desirable to other IT Management systems of record such as Service Management and IT Security platforms. Torii’s new open platform provides developers, power users, and partners with the opportunity to build their own connectors and make those available on a Plugin Marketplace. This ensures that niche applications important to a customer can be integrated with Torii. Where permitted by both systems this integration is bi-directional and event-driven, meaning automations and workflows can be triggered in real time.  

Torii has also completely overhauled its own API, providing rich documentation, code snippets, and in-browser testing, enabling developers to customize the platform to their own needs. Dashboards and other screens can be customized to display live contextual data from other systems, thereby enriching SaaS Management capabilities. For example, an application summary page could be configured to pull in payment data direct from the API of a payment card provider, or employee data from an HR system. 

Whilst many SMPs have customization capabilities Torii’s new features go to the next level. The use of a canvas-style low-code/no-code workflow builder with branching greatly simplifies development making advanced capabilities accessible to non-developers. 

AI Capabilities – the Torii AI Assistant (Ask Torii)

Torii are the first SMP to make Generative AI capabilities available to end users.

The assistant can answer questions about users, license counts, contract details, application statuses, and more. Torii provided the following details on the benefits of using the AI Assistant:

  • Instant Answers: No need to toggle between databases or sift through documents. Ask Torii’s AI Assistant your pressing questions and get instant, accurate answers, right within Slack.
  • Permission-Sensitive: The AI assistant provides answers based on the user permissions associated with the asker, keeping your data and insight secure. 
  • Focus on What Matters: By minimizing the time spent on repetitive queries, the AI Assistant enables you to allocate more time and attention to strategic initiatives and complex problem-solving.

This helps in three ways. Firstly, new contracts are automatically ingested, populating application records with key data such as price, renewal terms, purchaser, and so on. With churn in SaaS estates in the region of 30% of applications per year automating this ongoing laborious task will enable teams to focus on higher value activities. Secondly, the AI capabilities extend to application identification and a Slack-powered chatbot. The chatbot enables a conversational approach to interrogating the data held in Torii and unlocking it to make management decisions and provide insights. 

Summary 

These new capabilities ensure that Torii continues to be enterprise-ready. Power users and partners will welcome the ability to customize Torii to meet their own or their customer’s needs. Generative AI is a hot topic this year and a trend I’m sure we’ll see across ITAM & SaaS tooling in the months to come. The ability to ask the system a natural language question – such as “When are the renewals for Slack & Teams due and how much do they cost” will save time running reports and unlock new insights. 

For more info you can read the official Torii announcement here.

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