Apple @ Work: Mac admins are shipping AI-written code with mistakes, but fixing the problems is taking days

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage, and protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.

There’s no doubt that AI tools are making IT admins faster at writing code, researching issues, etc. As a Mac admin, I’ve seen slow but steady growth in how I’ve used it in my daily work across all aspects of IT. It’s not perfect, though. I’ve used it to write scripts, troubleshoot networking errors, and more. A new report from Fleet puts numbers on the problem: it’s easy to ship things, but it’s hard to undo mistakes.

About Apple @ Work: Bradley Chambers has been an Apple IT admin since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing firewalls, switches, a mobile device management system, enterprise grade WiFi, 1000s of Macs, and 1000s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple IT managers deploy Apple devices, build networks to support them, train users, share stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for IT departments.

For this report, Fleet surveyed more than 250 enterprise IT folks who manage Apple, all with admin access to their device management systems. The folks responding to the survey manage an average of 2,000 devices, and nearly half have 6 to 10 years of Apple admin experience.

The debate over whether IT teams should use AI day-to-day is over. They already are, and in the past 30 days, 68% of those responding reported using AI for troubleshooting or log analysis, 62% used it to write scripts, and 61% used it to author device management profiles or configurations. The log analysis is something that I use AI for often. 86% allow AI-written output into production after some form of review, and only 14% keep it out of their production environments entirely. There simply is no world where IT can operate at the speed needed without AI tools.

69% of respondents can’t roll back a bad configuration change within an hour, and 43% need more than a day. Another 26% of those responding can recover the same day, but only by doing it by hand. This is the biggest red flag of the survey, in my opinion. AI lets you ship anything fast, but AI can ship bugs just like humans can.

Here’s a real scenario that can happen: an IT admin asks an AI assistant to write a configuration profile, takes a quick pass at it, and pushes it to a few thousand Macs in seconds. If something is wrong with it (a bad network setting, a restriction that locks people out of an app they need), unwinding it could take a while.

Fleet’s CEO, Mike McNeil, said this:

I agree with him, and I am somewhat not happy about it. The job of an Apple admin has moved a long way from deploying Macs and iPads and managing through a device management console. Today it’s identity, security, compliance, and app lifecycle, all on top of a macOS release that forces changes every year. IT teams keep getting more and more added to them without additional resources or taking things away.

31% said keeping up with Apple’s release cadence is their single biggest IT challenge, far ahead of everything else on the survey. On the bright side, Apple’s own management architecture is moving in the right direction. 53% already have declarative device management in production.

Apple has done a lot of work here, and it’s not even Apple that is to blame for the frustration. Apple has built the platform for IT to do everything it needs to do. It’s everything else. Security is harder. AI has made it harder. It’s the expectation that IT has to own AI while owning literally everything else.

IT is using AI to help with its work because it’s the only way to survive the onslaught of the AI era. You aren’t getting more help, but you’re expected to do more without anything being taken away from you. Even systems that don’t need as much day-to-day management as they did years ago, you still have to own and secure them. Hosted email is a good example here. Yes, 365 and Workspace have made it easier to keep email running. You aren’t managing servers as you did 20 years ago, but email is still not easy. You traded server management for AI-driven phishing scams, MFA management, and more. It’s two steps forward and one back. We need a period of three steps forward and zero back to get back to where IT needs to be.

You can read Fleet’s full Apple in the enterprise report on its website.

Apple @ Work is exclusively brought to you by Mosyle, the only Apple Unified Platform. Mosyle is the only solution that integrates in a single professional grade platform all the solutions necessary to seamlessly and automatically deploy, manage, and protect Apple devices at work. Over 45,000 organizations trust Mosyle to make millions of Apple devices work ready with no effort and at an affordable cost. Request your EXTENDED TRIAL today and understand why Mosyle is everything you need to work with Apple.