DNSFilter’s support bot is moving on to bigger and better things

Like a freshly promoted employee, DNSFilter’s AI support bot is moving on to bigger and better things.

Since around June of last year, the AI-supported bot has taken low-stakes support tickets off the DNSFilter support desk’s hands, responding in as little as four minutes.

“It’s actually fully automated, as long as it’s a question that the bot categorizes as a tier-1 request,” Mikey Pruitt, head of AI labs at DNSFilter, told IT Brew in an RSAC interview. He defined tier-1 support tickets as low-complexity customer requests (e.g., inquiring if a solution has a certain capability). According to IT Brew’s 2026 State of the Industry survey, which focuses on AI and automation, almost four in 10 (39%) organizations are adopting or actively piloting IT service management automation.

Soon, however, DNSFilter’s support bot will shoulder more responsibility by responding to tier-2 tickets, which Pruitt described as requests that are slightly more complex and involve some “investigatory work.”

“Tier-2 tickets are like, something broke [or] my internet doesn’t work,” Pruitt said, adding that a combination of different problems could be the root of a particular issue. In this next phase, DNSFilter’s support bot will be able to articulate what a user is requesting and suggest how the employee could address the problem.

To be precise. Pruitt said the company trained its support bot agent using its existing support website.

“It does scans on that site and our actual marketing website, too, for new features…and it will update itself a little bit,” Pruitt said, adding that a technical writer who maintains DNSFilter’s support website is also “responsible for the bot’s knowledge.”

After training the support agent, Pruitt said the company had the bot write drafts of responses it would provide in specific scenarios to ensure the output met standards.

“There have been instances where it said something that we really didn’t like, and we had to forcefully code in, or type in, ‘Never say this,’” Pruitt said.

Phase two and onward. Pruitt said DNSFilter is currently running trials for tier-2 support tickets.

“We’re at the point now where we’re testing the next level of support requests that come in, and we’re giving it a little bit more freedom as time goes on,” Pruitt said. He expects to launch phase two by Q4 this year, but employees are already reaping the benefits of this phased rollout. Almost one-third (31%) of respondents to IT Brew’s 2026 State of the Industry survey said reducing manual tasks was the most important reason for adopting automation within their organization.

“They’re happy that they don’t have to do the menial stuff anymore,” Pruitt said. “It’s freed up their brains to think bigger about harder things.”

While Pruitt doesn’t know exactly what “phase three” of DNSFilter’s support agent will look like yet, he suspects that it will likely involve communication between different agents to address problems outside of any one agent’s realm. If someone requests a feature DNSFilter doesn’t currently have, for example, a support bot may reach out to a product bot so it could investigate further, Pruitt said.

“It’s an ecosystem that we’re building,” Pruitt said. “There’s this whole communication layer that the agents need to be having amongst themselves.”