There's a phrase I keep coming back to when I describe GoPilots: IT tools, built by IT people, for IT people.
It sounds like a slogan. The reality is more interesting than that.
GoPilots is GoTo's Customer Zero initiative — the program through which our internal IT organization uses GoTo's own products in production, at real enterprise scale, and systematically feeds what we learn back into product development. We don't just report bugs. We help define what enterprise-grade actually means for the tools we're selling to enterprise customers.
What Customer Zero actually means
The concept isn't new. "Eating your own dog food" — using your own product internally before releasing it to customers — is a well-established practice in software development. What makes GoPilots different is the organizational commitment behind it.
In the summer of 2023, IT made a decision that few internal teams would voluntarily make: we moved the entire corporate IT service desk off Samanage — a mature, stable platform we knew well — and onto GoToResolve. A GoTo product that at the time didn't have feature parity with what we were leaving behind.
We knew it didn't fully replicate what Samanage could do. We moved anyway. Because that's what Customer Zero requires: you don't wait until the product is ready for you. You get in early, identify the gaps, and work with the product team to close them. The value you provide is proportional to how early and honestly you engage.
That decision put us on the hook operationally. IT was now running a help desk function on a product that had known gaps in change control, queue management, API accessibility, and automated onboarding and offboarding workflows. We built workarounds. We documented exactly what was missing. We sat in monthly coordination meetings with the Resolve product teams — ticketing, asset management, remote access, device management — and gave them the kind of feedback that only an enterprise IT organization running the product in anger can give.
The feedback that matters most to a product team is not "this feature would be nice." It's "here is the specific enterprise workflow this doesn't support, here is the workaround we're running right now, and here is what needs to change for us to retire that workaround." That's what GoPilots provides.
What the numbers say about the feedback loop
As of mid-2025, the IT team has submitted 233 feature requests and bug reports into the GoToResolve Ticketing product — 46% of which have been integrated into the final product. For Asset Management, 68 submissions with a 57% integration rate. These aren't wishlist items. They're operational pain points from an enterprise IT team running the product at production scale across a global, multi-region organization.
The value flows in both directions. GoTo's product teams get enterprise-grade feedback from a real IT organization that shares the same target customer profile as the people they're selling to. IT gets a product that actually reflects enterprise operating requirements — because IT helped define them. And the sales and customer success teams get a team they can point to as a reference: the product has been running inside a real enterprise. Here's what that looks like.
That last point is underappreciated. When a potential enterprise customer asks "does this work at scale?" — the answer isn't a roadmap slide. It's a case study with a named internal customer who ran the deployment and is willing to talk about it.
The teams involved and what it takes to stay committed
GoPilots isn't just IT. It includes Corporate IT, Security Operations, HRIS, AskHR, Global Payroll — and as of 2026, the Facilities team is migrating their support queue from OfficeSpace to Resolve. Each team that joins the program makes an active commitment: use the product, document what works and what doesn't, participate in the feedback channels, and show up to the coordination sessions.
That commitment is harder than it sounds when you're also responsible for running operations. The honest version of what GoPilots costs internally is this: you are deliberately choosing a tool with known gaps over a mature alternative. You are absorbing operational friction in exchange for having real influence over the product's direction. Not every IT leader is willing to make that trade. The ones who do create a genuinely different kind of relationship with the product organization.
The feedback structure is specific and deliberate: dedicated Slack channels connecting development teams, internal users, and solution consultants; Jira integration for structured issue reporting; monthly coordination meetings by product module; separate sessions for device management and identity. It is not a suggestion box. It is a structured operating model for channeling enterprise operational experience into product decisions.
Where the program is going
The active initiatives tell the story. As of Q1 2026, GoPilots is deploying the Resolve agent to all IT-managed laptops globally — establishing Resolve as the single source of truth for software and hardware asset management. A proof of concept for mobile device management is running with the GoToConnect developer team. The Facilities team is joining the program, retiring OfficeSpace in the process and saving approximately $9,000 annually on licensing — with a path to replacing additional OfficeSpace capabilities that would save substantially more.
These are not pilots in the traditional sense. They are production deployments, running at enterprise scale, that generate ongoing feedback into GoTo's product roadmap. The program is expanding, not wrapping up.
"IT tools, built by IT people, for IT people. That's the whole idea."
Why this model matters beyond GoTo
Most enterprise IT organizations have no mechanism for influencing the tools they're required to use. They evaluate vendors, select platforms, and then operate within the constraints of what those platforms offer. When something doesn't work at scale, they file tickets with the vendor's support team and wait for a release cycle to address it. The feedback loop is slow, indirect, and generally biased toward large customers with dedicated account managers.
GoPilots inverts that dynamic. IT becomes an active participant in product development rather than a passive user of vendor output. That shift changes how IT thinks about the tools it runs, how the product teams think about enterprise requirements, and ultimately how good the product is for the external enterprise customers who buy it.
The ROI case for this kind of program isn't just cost savings from retiring third-party tools — though those are real. It's the $38,000+ in identified bugs before they reached paying customers. It's the 46% feature integration rate that represents genuine product improvement driven by enterprise operational reality. And it's the positioning it creates: an IT organization that is credibly the first and best customer of the company's own products.
That's a different kind of IT brand than "the team that keeps the lights on." It's a team that makes the product better. That matters to the business in a way that uptime metrics never quite capture.