Thrive CEO Bill McLaughlin refuses to call his company a managed service provider.
The company, which McLaughlin calls a “next gen service provider,” embeds AI and automation, in-house cybersecurity and cloud solutions into a managed IT services foundation. McLaughlin, who became CEO a year ago, is keeping those three pillars in mind as Thrive seeks to reach $1 billion in revenue by 2029.
“What we're doing and how we're doing it is really setting the stage for a new evolution of a service provider in our space,” McLaughlin said.
The New England-based firm landed an investment from Berkshire Partners and Court Square Capital Partners in January 2025 and is using the funding to continue its transformation. The company made five acquisitions in 2025 to take its total to 27. McLaughlin said the company has largely built its AI strategy organically, hiring 20 developers to maximize its ServiceNow platform and build out AI agents for internal and customer use.
McLaughlin said Thrive needed to use AI for its own operations before selling and servicing it.
“We're living it and breathing it. We're eating our own dog food,” he said.
Thrive has implemented numerous ServiceNow-based AI agents throughout its organization, including HR, finance and sales. McLaughlin said the agents free up employees from what ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott called “soul-crushing jobs” to focus on strategic, human-facing activities. Thrive is building sales-focused agents to increase the accuracy and speed of proposals. In the managed services arena, AI is routing customer calls and tickets.
“Anytime you can reduce hops, you decrease the amount of time that there is an issue or a user is waiting and provide more intelligence to our technicians and our engineers,” McLaughlin said.
Thrive is now pushing its internal agents out into the world. The firm is offering a ServiceNow instance called TransformIT that contains pre-built workflows and AI modules.
“A lot of smaller SMB or mid-enterprise businesses aren't going to go and spend the money on an enterprise platform, first and foremost, nor do they have the capital to go and hire a bunch of developers to build out the workflows for their business,” McLaughlin said. “We've done all that heavy lifting and now we're providing them with that instance.”
The company in September rolled out managed AI services for mid-market clients. The service-based AI model is aimed at technology advisor customers, who prefer to source a services layer around their sales.
“If you sell software, you've got to manage it. You've got to support it,” said McLaughlin. “The [tech service distributors] and the partners don't want to do that. They want to go in and do what they do best: create opportunity, bring in a partner who has the ability to provide the solution and service the solution.”
Taylor Ballard, president and managing partner at Data Technology Brokers, said Thrive has performed well with clients “regardless of project scope.”
“Thrive’s expansion of Agentic AI within ServiceNow, paired with their investment in top-tier talent, proves their dedication to providing their clients with superior security,” Ballard told Channel Dive in an email. “Because Thrive continues to innovate and invest in their people, they are able to deliver measurable results and positive customer outcomes.”
A model ServiceNow partner
Thrive’s use of ServiceNow agents is unique among MSPs.
Most MSPs don’t use the IT management platform. The vast majority of MSPs acquired by Thrive had been using ConnectWise. While ConnectWise, Kaseya, N-Able and similar providers are a great fit for small MSPs, McLaughlin said Thrive had outgrown them.
“Once you get to $30 or $40 million and you're taking on larger, mid-market, complex types of accounts, is when you start to really outgrow those traditional MSP bill platforms,” he said.
Thrive’s move up into the mid-market coincided with ServiceNow’s push downward into the segment. ServiceNow noted that its December acquisition of identity security provider Veza boosted its capabilities in mid-market.
McLaughlin said running a ServiceNow platform requires human capital and expertise.
“It's big, it's expensive, and it's not off-the-shelf. It's very customizable and very bespoke, and it was built purposely that way, so you can take it and really make sure that you have the ability to develop and build these workflows and automation very specific to your business,” he said.
