Dive Brief:
- Software startup Lexful launched an AI-native documentation platform for managed service providers on Wednesday. The platform is designed to help MSPs track data across disparate tools, Lexful said in the announcement.
- “We are here to make operations much faster, to find answers to tickets much, much faster and really help MSPs scale, because manual documentation updates don't scale,” CEO Pinar Ormeci told Channel Dive.
- The company ran the platform through beta trials with hundreds of MSPs prior to making it generally available, Ormeci said. The platform integrates with professional service automation and remote monitoring and management platforms and automatically documents information. MSPs can use Lexful’s AI search engine to retrieve passwords, asset information and patches.
Dive Insight:
Legacy documentation processes slow businesses and hold back growth. MSPs are not immune the problem.
“Most MSPs don’t have a ‘tool problem’; they have an ‘operational mess’ problem,” said Mike Kolb, founder of consultancy The MSP Hero, in the announcement.
Manual entry is an inherently slow process and service providers that lack a single source of truth for their records are hamstrung when it comes to responding to customer requests.
“Documents are across tools, across different tabs. They get stale as soon as they are written, unless somebody is manually updating it, which almost never happens,” Ormeci said.
The result is that MSP technicians can’t find the documents they need or lose trust in the ones they find, and resort to tribal knowledge to solve problems.
Lexful trained a “ChatGPT-like” AI assistant called Ask Lex to track down information in ways legacy search cannot. Ormeci said keyword searches often generate irrelevant answers, leaving technicians to crawl through folders full of duplicate documents.
Descent IT President Steven Saehrig said his company previously used IT Glue to search for documents and struggled to find accurate results. He spends less time training his team on how to name and sort documents now that Descent is using Ask Lex.
“It gives you really positive and accurate information back about the documentation in the system, and it's very transparent about how it gets those results,” Saehrig told Channel Dive.
Saehrig said he doesn’t currently have plans to stop using IT Glue, but he can see Lexful displacing it and other legacy documentation systems.
“I think the classic model of documentation is being replaced with this AI-enabled version,” he said.
Pax8 and other companies in the industry have promoted the concept of a managed intelligence provider — an MSP that uses data and automation to orchestrate AI agents and provide proactive insights. But MSPs need autonomous document capture if they’re ever going to achieve that, Ormeci said. The Lexful solution was to build a documentation platform from the ground up with AI.
The firm is backed by Top Down Ventures, the investing arm of IT Glue founder Chris Day. After selling IT Glue to Kaseya, Day has been pursuing AI-forward companies that address MSP pain points.
“He is the guy who basically built documentation,” Ormeci said.
Lexful is taking an API-heavy approach. It will integrate with the major PSA and RMM companies and has already integrated with Top Down-funded ScalePad and MSP asset intelligence provider Lionguard.
MSP tools have historically been siloed, but the industry is pushing for them to integrate. Saehrig said Lexful will save his team time by enabling access to other tools.
“There's so much value in what Lionguard does, and that's why they have such a great product, but I'm walking into two portals. Maybe someday I can get to one, because I can ask Lexful, 'Hey, get me the information about this device,' and it will go talk to Lionguard and ScalePad and bring back data from other systems,” he said.
