BisectHosting COO 称 AI 助手 Biko 赋能支持团队转型

Hello! Welcome to the latest edition of AI Gamechangers, your regular glimpse into the work of leaders from across the games industry who are putting AI to practical use.

We hear plenty about generated art and chatty NPCs, but this time we look at something arguably more useful. Our Q&A today is with Luke O’Leary, COO of BisectHosting, a major name in player-owned game servers. Luke tells us how Biko, its AI assistant built into the server panel, can read a server’s logs, configs and mods, work out why it’s lagging and fix it, all from a chat window. He also explains why humans still matter, and why Biko comes with an off switch.

As ever, scroll down for our round-up of AI news, links and videos.

Luke O’Leary, BisectHosting

Meet Luke O’Leary, COO of BisectHosting, which has rented out player-owned game servers since 2011. Luke joined as a knowledge base writer and worked his way up, and he still plays Minecraft. The company now hosts around 110 games.

In this interview, Luke explains how Biko, an AI assistant inside the server panel, reads logs and configs to diagnose problems and fix them through conversation. We also talk about keeping humans in the loop, and why practical AI like this could prove to be important in the games industry.

Top takeaways from this conversation:

1. Biko reads a customer’s actual server (resources, logs, configs and installed mods), so it can diagnose lag and fix it within one conversation, for example by culling excess entities.

2. BisectHosting positions Biko as a “buddy” on the panel rather than a step on the way to support, and it proactively spots errors in crash logs to offer help before customers notice a problem.

3. A model-agnostic harness routes each question to a suitable model, with a small, cheap model triaging first, which keeps token costs down and makes swapping in new models easy.

4. Humans stay central: customers can switch Biko off, tickets pass to agents with a summary, and support staff have moved into training and game integration roles with no AI-related layoffs.

AI Gamechangers: To break the ice, can you tell us a little about BisectHosting, what it does and how you came to join the company?

Luke O’Leary: I’ll start with a little bit of background. Max and Andrew, our co-founders, are still working at the company as CEO and CTO. They met on a Minecraft server! It doesn’t get more perfect than that, right? This was 2011, so we’ve been in business for about 15 years.

We’re in the player-owned game server hosting space, or POGS. We’re a niche of a niche. There’s game server hosting like AWS GameLift, which is more for developer-owned game servers. But there’s a huge market in player-owned game servers, where players own the server themselves, and it’s a great conduit for communities. Modded games are a really big thing for us.

“Whenever a host announces AI, its Discord fills with negativity. People are upset about the change. That’s one of the biggest reasons we didn’t want Biko to be part of the support flow, and why we gave people the option to turn it off”
Luke O’Leary

I joined the company about seven years ago, starting as a knowledge base writer. You can probably hear my voice on some old YouTube videos, if you want any blackmail! Then I quickly moved up through the ranks. We were a pretty small company, and my attitude was, “Give me anything, I’ll do it.” At a small company, you end up wearing many hats. I moved into operations, and we’re about 100 people now, across all sorts of roles. We have engineers and AI training specialists. We’re one of the only server hosting companies that still has a pretty significant support team. That’s one of our biggest USPs and founding pillars. We really focus on bringing high-touch support to our customers, through AI, of course, but also through human support.

We now host about 110 different games. We started with Minecraft and grew quickly. We’ve hosted over two million game servers for customers across the globe, in 22 locations, with roughly 50 million player sessions in the years we’ve been open.

AI Gamechangers: You’re a Minecraft player yourself. How does being a player shape the products you build?

Luke O’Leary: It’s so important. That’s actually one of the most difficult things with hiring product managers or developers: it’s not something you can teach through a presentation or slideshow. You have to love it. You have to be really into games.

Being a former Minecraft player, and still one to this day, really shapes what we build. I think we have a much closer relationship with what customers actually want, rather than only listening to surveys or creating this separation between the product manager, the product owner and the customer. We are the customer. I use our services literally every day to play different games.

It also helps the general environment at Bisect. We play games together all the time. We just started hosting WARDOGS, and we have a Bisect WARDOGS server. We’re always in there. It creates a fun environment. It’s exciting to work in games in general.

AI Gamechangers: What was the lightbulb moment that led you to create your AI assistant, Biko?

Luke O’Leary: The biggest issue we have is that managing a game server can be pretty complex. Typically it’s reserved for server admins or people with home labs or machines. Your everyday player isn’t going to want to learn how to set up a server binary and port-forward their IP address. Our whole motto, the reason we exist, is making server hosting as easy as possible.

We already had a very friendly UI, but then we saw the entire tech industry switch. People aren’t necessarily interacting with user interfaces as much. They’re chatting to a bot that interfaces with systems, performs the same actions agentically or provides information with context. That’s where the moment snapped. We thought, “We need that!” People who are already used to communicating with ChatGPT or Claude need to be able to do everything they could in the panel, with the context of their server, but through a simple conversation instead.

You can go from not having a server to having a server, and it all happens within a chat window. It’s been really successful. We’ve seen people ask all sorts of questions and have it perform all sorts of actions on their behalf.

AI Gamechangers: Can you walk us through a typical use of Biko? Say a customer finds that their server is lagging. What happens?

Luke O’Leary: That’s one of the biggest distinctions between us and what other companies use AI chat for. A lot of companies use AI as a step towards getting to a human support agent. It’s just part of the support flow. For us, it’s more like a buddy that lives on your server panel. That’s why we brand it as an AI assistant rather than AI support.

It’s fully contextually aware of the server environment: the resources, files, configurations, where it’s hosted, what game is hosted, what mods are installed. I could go on.

A good scenario is someone hosting a Minecraft server, and for some reason it’s lagging. It’s a sandboxy, open-world game with entities, so you can have a lot of cows or pigs in the game. Minecraft is, ironically and historically, not the most optimised binary in the world. It’s old Java that’s been around for a long time. When you start spawning a lot of mobs (entities), the server can begin to lag. You can chuck as many resources as you like at it, but it won’t make a difference.

You notice the game server’s TPS [Ticks Per Second] beginning to drop. Biko will proactively detect that and alert you in the panel: “Hey, I can help you figure out why this is a problem.” You can converse with it as simply as you would with a human technical system administrator: “Can you help me diagnose this?”

It’ll run a CPU profiler and observe the game server ticks using a platform called Spark, for example. It’ll run the report, wait 30 seconds, review the full report and come back with something like: “You’ve got too many entities on your server. I can kill 80% of them for you to get it running back to normal.” It can do that through the conversation from start to finish. Your server is working as usual, and you haven’t had to learn all the specifics. It’s a lot more friendly to a 16-year-old server admin trying to run a game for their friends.

AI Gamechangers: So Biko is proactive as well as responding to questions? It can spot problems and alert users before they ask for help?

Luke O’Leary: Exactly. It might notice an announcement from our internal team that we’re doing maintenance on a server. It can read the server telemetry, the data. It can notice a certain error in a crash log, detected through regex. It’ll pop up in the corner and proactively help the customer find a solution, even when they don’t yet know there’s a problem.

That proactive approach is something we’ve always taken, including with our human support. As I mentioned, it’s one of our biggest USPs.

AI Gamechangers: Which LLM powers Biko? Is it a fine-tuned version of ChatGPT, or something else?

Luke O’Leary: The harness is our own, and the actual LLM is determined dynamically depending on the type of question. It’s not just one particular model. We have an initial, much smaller, affordable model that determines the state of the question.

As you can imagine with any chatbot, you get a lot of trolling, or people just having fun with it. You don’t need to put a super-expensive, time-consuming model towards that. So it dynamically adjusts. We move between different GPT models and Claude, depending on what they’re good at. Our system prompt and tool calls are set up to understand which models are best at solving particular problems.

AI Gamechangers: That must also help control token costs, so you’re not spending heavily on trivial requests?

Luke O’Leary: Exactly. Before we did this, we noticed we were spending a lot of money on someone asking what your favourite pancake is, or something equally silly.

AI Gamechangers: You still offer direct human support, rather than requiring customers to work through Biko first. Why is that so important?

Luke O’Leary: The whole reason BisectHosting exists was Max and Andrew’s frustration with support. Back in 2011, you’d rent a dedicated machine and then be left to figure things out yourself.

We can proactively support game server management through an intuitive panel and have Biko there as an assistant to help with actions. But most importantly, we still have 24/7, 365-days-a-year support agents available, with a five-minute reply time. We genuinely care about the games industry, and we get excited when we see someone have a problem and we solve it for them. Sometimes a human has to intervene to make that happen.

“There’s an educational element. When AI does something on behalf of the customer, we should also educate them about what’s happening so they understand the decisions being made”
Luke O’Leary

From a business perspective, it’s important too, because we’re a subscription business. The customer needs to keep their server. When there’s a problem and they’re frustrated, there’s a higher likelihood of them churning. High-touch support has allowed us to build really strong loyalty. A large percentage of people who come back to us have been customers before. We’ve built a strong community based purely on the support. Some customers know our support agents by name.

What I really love is that AI has empowered a lot of our support agents to move into more advanced roles. We haven’t had any layoffs because of it. In fact, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve moved people into positions where Biko handles simpler questions that a support agent might have answered 20 times in a day, so people can focus on complex technical problems. We’ve seen them move into AI training specialist roles and game integration specialist (GIS) roles. They’re support-adjacent positions that allow people to deal with specialised cases.

AI Gamechangers: There’s scepticism about AI among some players and parts of the games industry. Have your customers embraced Biko, or do you encounter resistance?

Luke O’Leary: I say to my team, “My favourite feature about Biko is that you can turn it off.” If you always want to speak with a human agent, there’s a toggle switch in account settings. We were successful long before AI, even though I think AI can be really helpful.

The large majority of our customers have thoroughly embraced it, either through the proactive approach or just because it’s a good buddy to ask questions. A solid majority are interfacing with Biko every time they open their panel. But we understand the pushback. We get it. Sometimes it’s just AI fatigue. Every tech company is trying to push a very basic, ironically vibe-coded chatbot with some context, and it can be frustrating when you’re trying to reach a human.

We thought, if we’re going to build this, the customer should still have control. They can turn it off. They have settings for when Biko appears and when it can be minimised. That hasn’t had an impact on adoption. If people are against it, pushing it harder isn’t going to change anything. We might as well give them the option and make those customers happy too.

AI Gamechangers: How has AI changed the way your support team works? Have staff needed new training or skills?

Luke O’Leary: Before AI, a lot of the work was searching for answers. We deal with 110 different games and we’re really big in the UGC market. Add tens of thousands of mods and configurations, and you can’t expect a single support agent to retain all that information.

We built an internal wiki and an external help centre. Previously, an agent would search through the help centre and the wiki, which could be a pretty long-winded process while the customer waited for an answer.

Now we have an internal version of Biko with even more awareness and capabilities specific to our support agents. When you’re talking to a human, they have their own version of Biko alongside them to help run through those same steps much faster. The time to first answer, or even resolution, has significantly reduced since we introduced AI to the team.

When you hit complicated problems, that’s when specialists’ abilities and training really kick in. All of our team had to adapt to AI. We’re big promoters of it internally, as a tool, a development philosophy and a way of getting the grunt work taken care of so we can focus on bigger-picture initiatives.

AI Gamechangers: Where does Biko still struggle compared with a human? Are there situations where you wouldn’t advise using it?

Luke O’Leary: I’m going to give you a really boring answer: billing. It just doesn’t do a very good job with billing. It’s something we’re working on, being able to answer any billing questions.

On the server side, I think with any AI, the more you open up the context window, the more likely it is to be poisoned with misinformation or go in the wrong direction. Thankfully, we’ve implemented a system where it can recognise that, especially when the customer’s tone suggests they’re frustrated.

It offers to create a support ticket on their behalf and integrates with Zendesk, our support platform partner. It creates a ticket, summarises the conversation for the support agent and forwards it to someone who can dive deeper. I think we’ve all been there with AI. Make no mistake, we get it. Sometimes it happens.

AI Gamechangers: You gave Biko a name. Does it also have a personality? Was it important that it felt like more than a chatbot?

Luke O’Leary: It’s funny. We’re going to release something soon, likely for the holiday season or an upcoming game launch, where Biko will start talking in the theme of a recently deployed game, just for fun. With something like Windrose, the pirate game, we’d like to give it a pirate accent.

“It’ll run a CPU profiler and observe the game server ticks. It’ll run the report, wait 30 seconds, and come back. It can do that through the conversation from start to finish. Your server is working as usual, and you haven’t had to learn all the specifics. It’s a lot more friendly”
Luke O’Leary

Generally, he’s very whimsical. It’s like talking to someone on Discord. The replies are very, very short, with no crazy Markdown styling. It’s not the very verbose output you get from Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini. It’s short and conversational, with a fun personality. You can joke with it and it’ll joke back. We’ve programmed some pretty fun Easter eggs, which I’d encourage people to find. We try to make it fun, and a little more human.

AI Gamechangers: Much of the games industry’s AI conversation focuses on glamorous uses such as asset creation or AI-powered NPCs. Do you think practical, technical applications like Biko will ultimately prove just as important?

Luke O’Leary: I think so. We’ve all seen companies implement AI almost because of stakeholder requests. They’re trying to hit keywords on Google or in the next investor meeting. There’s a lot of fluff.

AI has its pros and cons in games, whether it’s asset creation or Nvidia’s approach to the idea that no one’s going to own a computer any more, they’ll rent it instead. There are questionable parts.

When you get into development and system administration, where things are so complex, there’s a pro and a con. It’s amazing for people who have no interest in being server administrators. They just want something to talk to that can resolve issues without technical understanding. It’s the same reason a lot of project managers are building their own systems with tools like Base44. You can just ask it to build things for you. That’s extremely powerful.

I think things like Biko are here to stay, especially chatbots that are specially designed with a lot of intent and care, not to toot our own horn. But there’s a downside too. We’re creating a generation of server administrators who don’t actually know what’s happening under the hood.

There’s an educational element. We’ve talked about how, when AI does something on behalf of the customer, we should also educate them about what’s happening so they understand the decisions being made. Maybe one day ChatGPT or Claude token costs skyrocket, and AI won’t be as easily accessible in ten years. We need to think about that too.

AI Gamechangers: AI is moving so quickly, with new models such as Jev appearing all the time. How does your team keep up, and decide which developments are worth adopting?

Luke O’Leary: Our team is intrinsically very technical, because of the industry we’re in. Everyone we hire has a pretty high technical aptitude. We even have a channel literally labelled “AI”, where people stream news. We’re all contributing and making sure things are up to date.

When a new AI launches that’s more cost-effective or better at particular issues, our developers will work on a ticket to find a way to implement it, then experiment with how it can improve answers. When you’ve developed a harness that’s model-agnostic, it’s pretty easy to implement these things.

“AI has empowered a lot of our support agents to move into more advanced roles. We haven’t had any layoffs because of it. We’ve moved people into positions where Biko handles simpler questions so people can focus on complex technical problems”
Luke O’Leary

But something like Jev AI is a whole new ball game. As AI continues to evolve, it’s important that the company evolves with it, while being careful to identify whether something is just a fad. There’s a lot of that in AI right now.

AI Gamechangers: Looking a year ahead, what’s on the roadmap for Biko and BisectHosting more broadly?

Luke O’Leary: It’s a mixed bag. We plan to introduce new features into Starbase, our management panel, to help with server administration and server costs. Unfortunately, because of AI, the cost of hardware is a big issue. As a hardware-as-a-service company, it’s difficult to keep costs low.

Introducing ways to split costs with other players on the server is important. It’s not like a Netflix subscription where you pay $12 a month. These servers can be $30 or $40 a month, depending on what you’re playing.

We also want to sink our teeth deeper into the UGC market. We’re excited to build more collaborations with modding partners, through commission and affiliate systems and a platform that lets them promote and essentially sell their modded content.

As I mentioned, POGS, player-owned game servers, has transitioned towards DOGS, developer-owned game servers. We have this infrastructure and a proprietary panel to manage it. It works great for server admins and players running one-off servers. How can we build features that let developers and game studios manage their servers and help reduce that cloud tax?

In a year’s time, I’d say we’d have prototypes or beta versions of a lot of these features available to the public.

AI Gamechangers: Are other server hosting companies having to adapt to AI too? Do you see a fundamental change across the sector?

Luke O’Leary: Definitely. Almost every host is releasing some sort of chatbot. Traditionally, a common approach, especially for smaller hosts, has been to make things easy through Discord. People build a chatbot or an application bot for Discord and communicate through that.

It’s almost become an expectation in the industry to have some sort of server assistant available. Obviously I’m biased, but they have varying levels of success with customers. It’s funny: whenever a host announces AI, its Discord fills with negativity. People are upset about the change. That’s one of the biggest reasons we didn’t want Biko to be part of the support flow, and why we gave people the option to turn it off. It seems counterintuitive, but it matters.

“Managing a game server can be pretty complex. The reason we exist is making server hosting as easy as possible. We already had a very friendly UI, but… people aren’t necessarily interacting with user interfaces as much. They’re chatting to a bot”
Luke O’Leary

Across the whole industry, including developer-owned game servers, there’s another issue. I’m talking about services such as GameLift, Multiplay and Rocket Science. Hardware availability has become a major problem because of AI data centres. When you’re bidding for hardware, an AI company can sweep it up for twice the cost because there’s so much funding involved.

It’s a tough battle to keep our prices reasonable. I think that’s common across the industry, especially during big booms like Palworld. Suddenly you see an enormous jump in player numbers, and there needs to be hardware to back it up, but it just doesn’t exist. That creates a lot of issues.

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Further down the rabbit hole

Some useful news, views and links to keep you going until next time:

• Claude Code now refuses to rebuild a specific existing game, “even if it is renamed”. Anthropic says it’s to stop IP infringement, as indie studios pull demos and playtests for fear of AI clones.

• Bluesky is going into “social vibe coding”: its Attie app now enables users to build and share games and quizzes with a built-in audience, says TechCrunch.

• A Microsoft Xbox strategist said the games industry is “using AI” and is afraid to admit it, then his X account vanished, per Windows Central. It’s not clear whether the two are related, so no conspiracy theories here.

• Studio Atelico has opened Early Access to the Atelico AI Engine, middleware for Unity, Unreal and Godot that runs language models, image generation and NPC behaviour entirely on the player’s device. It already powers the studio’s card battler Bobium Brawlers.

• Adaptive music platform TYGER has signed a licensing deal with Universal Music Group, which it says is the first major music company to do so. Licensed tracks adapt in real time to what’s happening in your game, with no studio integration needed. It’s currently in closed beta across 20+ titles.

• Tripo AI has open-sourced EdenLive, a real-time generative renderer that turns rough visuals from a game engine or coding agent into richer video. It manages 720p at over 24fps on a single RTX 5090. The release includes model weights, code and a prompt-to-game frontend.

• More than 80% of Roblox’s top 100 games by hours played now use AI in development, according to PocketGamer.biz. Playgama’s new AI Game Index adds that Claude Opus was used for 54% of the new AI-built games it tracked, though OpenAI’s Astra-built games get more likes per play.

• Com2uS Platform has released a Hive Axyl plugin for ChatGPT, so developers can ask Codex to add backend features like login, payments and in-game mail.