I worked in the emergency room, but not in a hospital. I wanted a colleague.

For half a decade at Microsoft I was responsible for the service providers of Central and Eastern Europe. I met the largest providers in my region, the ones running the largest systems, and I was in the United States many times to understand how extremely large datacenters are built and, more importantly, how they are operated. I met the team that built the Polish national cloud. Back home I was involved in the Hungarian national datacenter consolidation, and before that in the server consolidation onto VMware, because at the time I was VMware's first systems engineer in Hungary.

But the part of my career that made okoskollega was not the corporate part.

As an entrepreneur I ran my own service provider for more than ten years. I owned three racks of enterprise-grade datacenter equipment, SAN fabric A and B included. That rack was built to run forever. And still, I faced the same problems as everyone else who has ever hosted other people's systems.

Hosting is the emergency room of the IT business. Sometimes nothing happens for days. Then someone walks in covered in blood and needs to be fixed right now, because a life depends on it, or at least an SLA does. I wanted to fix problems when I decided to fix them, not when I had to because a service level was degrading at two in the morning. I wanted more and more automation, to avoid the drama, the weekends and the nights.

I did not like solving tickets either. A user needed something from me, and even if they were paying for more services, it was always me reading the ticket, understanding what they actually needed, and doing it. I automated everything I could to make it easy for them and for myself, but the understanding part stayed with me.

And I hated the daily grind of operations. Checking the ops logs every morning. Noisy neighbours. A hot CPU. A disk running out of space. A power cut. An internet outage. Email spam. A DoS attack. All the nasty work that comes with running things for other people.

So I was always dreaming about a system that does not need me. A system that runs itself and operates itself, that solves customer requests, that is, in effect, operated by someone for me. Someone who understands as much as I do, because they know the design, the running configuration and every detail of the estate. I always wanted an okos kolléga, a smart colleague, a partner in crime.

I have thirty years in IT behind me, ten of them in hosting, and the last two years of continuous research since the rise of AI. And finally, I have the product that does the job. The way I always wanted it done.

When I talked about it to friends, family and fools, almost everyone accepted the same fact: this is a sellable product.

I am a service provider, so the first okos kolléga runs a service provider's helpdesk and operations. But a smart colleague is not an IT thing. It fits any industry that has people asking for help, and any operational job that needs daily checks, daily decisions and someone who never forgets what happened last time.

That colleague is Kolli. It runs our helpdesk today. It runs our customers' helpdesk today. And it runs on hardware we own, so nothing anyone tells it ever leaves the building.