DarcyIQ Beats Kaseya to the MCP for Autotask Punch
And that’s not the only thing interesting about this AI-native MSP software maker, which helps show how hard it is for managed services platform providers to move as fast in AI as startups.
Speaking of AI for MSPs, hat tip to Dave Sobel and the indispensable Business of Tech podcast for calling my attention to a recently announced MCP-based chatbot interface for Kaseya’s Autotask PSA from DarcyIQ.
Channelholic regulars will appreciate immediately why that story grabbed my interest: 1) I’ve been writing a whole lot in recent weeks about the potentially transformational impact of MCP interfaces on RMM and PSA solutions, and 2) one of those stories discussed an MCP interface coming from Kaseya itself. Is DarcyIQ collaborating with Kaseya on MCP? Competing with it?
Keep reading for an answer to both questions. First, let’s discuss DarcyIQ, because it’s a sign of the times for AI in MSP software in several different ways.
To begin, DarcyIQ isn’t a company strictly speaking so much as an AI-powered platform from Darcy, a business unit of top-tier AWS service partner Innovative Solutions with origins stretching back 18 months or so ago to a marketing campaign that resulted in what most solution providers would agree is a nice problem to have.
“We had an influx of leads, and we could not for the life of us keep up with it,” recalls Travis Rehl (pictured), Innovative’s CTO.
That left the company with three choices: hire more salespeople, leave some of its leads unpursued for weeks, or drop a portion of those potential deals altogether.
“Honestly, we hated all three options,” Rehl says, “so we made a fourth, and that evolved into what we call Darcy.”
Coded from scratch by Innovative using four separate AWS Bedrock LLMs, the system is designed to help MSPs and other service providers find, qualify, and nurture leads automatically before rapidly turning them into sales prospects.
“Our team can meet a customer, we can engage with them and learn about their desires as a business, we can devise a proposal in PowerPoint in their format, and hand it right back to the customer in under an hour,” Rehl says. That’s about 70% less time, Innovative estimates, than you’d need using traditional methods.
Darcy provides live AI assistance during sales calls too by doing things like generate meeting summaries on the fly in near real time. Functionality vaguely reminiscent of what fellow AI-native startup Cyft is building silently listens to calls, anticipates questions the prospect is about to ask, and suggests answers within about two seconds.
“It’s wicked fast,” Rehl says. “If a customer asks a question, usually before they’re even done speaking, Darcy probably has come up with additional information.” The system proposes questions for you to ask as well to keep the conversation moving toward a sale.
Make the sale, of course, and you now have to process tickets, create documentation, manage projects, and more for the customer inside your PSA solution. All of that would be much simpler, Rehl and team mused, with automated assistance from Darcy, so they began drawing up plans to integrate the system via MCP with the PSA solution Innovative itself uses, Autotask. They quickly encountered a roadblock, however.
“We went looking, and Kaseya didn’t have an MCP server,” Rehl says. “So we ended up just building one for them.”
Using it and its chatbot front end, technicians can query and control Autotask with natural language prompting. Agentic capabilities let MSPs perform a variety of complex tasks automatically too.
“We’re an Amazon partner, and Darcy is literally looking into an Amazon account to find what the customer is building, deploying, and changing, pulling that information out, finding the gaps that we should suggest back to the customer, and writing those gaps as tickets right back into Autotask,” Rehl says.
Kaseya is neither collaborating with Innovative on DarcyIQ nor standing in its way. Executives at the company right up to CEO Rania Succar have spoken supportively with the company, which has no intention of souring that relationship down the road.
“Our hope and dream is that eventually they will have their own Autotask MCP, among others, and we can retire ours and use theirs,” Rehl says.
In the meantime, DarcyIQ and products like it from Cyft, zofiQ (which has a brand new client insights agent), and others are bearing out something N-able’s chief technology and product officer said back in May: it’s really hard for end-to-end managed services platform providers to move as fast in AI as nimble young startups. Kaseya expects to launch an MCP interface next year some time. Innovative converted a system originally meant for internal use into a market-ready, generally available product in just nine months.
“We didn’t want to wait until 2026,” Rehl says.