Dive Brief:
- ConnectWise launched its new IT service management platform, embedding agentic AI from its acquisition of Zofiq into its stack, the company said in an announcement Monday. The professional services automation provider bought Zofiq, a service desk operations automation company, in January.
- Announced at the Pax8 Beyond conference, the ConnectWise Platform analyzes customer service tickets to provide predictive analytics to managed service providers — and handles tickets autonomously if they so choose. “We can do all the things that you normally would do, but take humans and handoffs and time... and take care of that for all of your customer base,” CEO Manny Rivelo told Channel Dive.
- The platform will go into general availability at the end of June. MSPs that opt in will sign a privacy waiver and pay an extra cost, Rivelo said.
Dive Insight:
ConnectWise pitches the platform as a path to improved MSP margins. IT service providers and the software providers that power them believe they can raise their top line revenue faster than their labor-heavy bottom line.
A ConnectWise study of more than 250 average-sized MSPs found that service providers on average can regain 5-12 points of margin and unlock more than $1 million in strategic revenue opportunity.
The platform is going to allow MSPs to scale, Rivelo said. Historically, MSPs needed to add customers to grow, and that meant adding staff to manage new endpoints. If their ITSM software works autonomously in the background to predict and fix problems, they can deliver services faster and add customers.
“The equation has been, ‘I gotta deal with more tickets, so I need more labor.’ That equation is what we're trying to break,” Rivelo said.
MSPs can choose to handle tickets on their own while an agent on the side offers insights about what it would do. Rivelo said users inevitably choose to hand off tasks.
Rivelo said the larger MSPs are set to enjoy the biggest benefits as autonomous agents allow them to restructure their workforce.
“When you're a small MSP, and you have 14 technicians, we could reduce your ticket count, but you can't repurpose a body,” he said.
As it is with ConnectWise’s rival Kaseya, the pricing structure for the agentic platform is still forming. Rivelo said he expects three different types of costs.
Copilot-style agents will be priced on a per user basis, agents tackling high volume ticketing will be priced per ticket and advanced agents handling complex tickets will be priced on consumption. Token-based pricing will become increasingly common as MSPs become comfortable with usage meters, Rivelo said.
“The more you want the agents to do, the more tokens you burn,” Rivelo said. “Therefore, the higher the bill is going to run. It's just a meter on those kinds of things, but the key will be that the return on that is way greater than the labor costs associated, because today the MSP model is breaking.”
