Mizo Wants Agents and Humans in Healthy Relationships
The AI-native software maker for MSPs expects technicians and agents to work side by side for many years to come.
I’ll take it on faith that Mizo’s implementation of MCP is safe, given that Mathieu Tougas, its CEO and co-founder, has a background in both software development and product management. That experience came in handy when Tougas agreed to lead his brother’s managed services practice.
“They were growing quite fast,” Tougas (pictured) says, so fast that they were having trouble keeping pace with onboarding and other operational challenges. Tougas, who has helped scale startups before, dug into the bottlenecks.
“What we first thought was a process and human problem ended up being both process and technology problems,” he recalls, so the company created an AI-powered service desk automation tool to address them. By last December, they knew they’d built something a lot of MSPs with similar issues would get similar benefit from.
“And that’s how Mizo came to be,” Tougas says.
The company, which has been in market with a solution since early this year and currently has about 20 MSP partners, is among a growing crop of AI-for-managed-services vendors all trying in one way or another to ease MSPs through the transition from help desk laborers to agent wranglers.
“We really believe in that switch from humans doing everything to managing agents, and we want to be at the forefront of that,” Tougas says.
What companies like Mizo disagree about, of course, is how active that management should be. Some are comfortable handing entire workflows over to agents now. Others, like Pia, are gradually coaxing partners in that same direction. Mizo, by contrast, sees humans and agents working collaboratively to at least some extent for the duration.
“We really see ourselves as the J.A.R.V.I.S. of the MSP,” Tougas says. “Our philosophy is really changing that human-in-the-way approach to human-in-the-loop.”
Which implies that just like Tony Stark and his J.A.R.V.I.S., MSPs and their digital buddies are going to need to get along, a fact that results in a lot of thoughtful AI anthropomorphizing at Mizo.
“We really approach it as another employee,” says Tougas of the company’s agent, a remark that rhymes a bit with Microsoft’s prediction that tomorrow’s knowledge workers will be “agent bosses”, supervising swarms of largely autonomous digital assistants rather than performing knowledge work themselves. MSPs will be no different, Tougas believes.
“The role humans are going to be playing is going to probably greatly change from doing most of the work as an individual contributor, as a technician, as a service manager to having a more of an agentic-human relationship where you manage agents that do tasks and you’re in the loop where you need to be,” he says.
Note the word “relationship” there. It comes up frequently in Mizo’s thinking, along with “trust.”
“Whenever we have a new customer, we’ll always deploy in a recommendation mode first, so our customers start to learn and have a relationship with our agent,” Tougas notes. “You need to trust that agent to do actions in a real-life setting.”
At present, Mizo mostly automates dispatch and communication functions. “That’s sending emails, reminders, making sure that the right communication is done at the right time,” Tougas explains. The company is well on the way to closing tickets as well, though.
“We believe that by 2026 most of it’s going to be automated,” Tougas says. Tasks that don’t involve the help desk, like billing and project management, are on the roadmap too for automation.
Interested to learn more? Anyone attending ConnectWise’s IT Nation Connect event this week can hear Mizo’s story straight from Mizo itself on Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. ET during the finalist round of ConnectWise’s PitchIT contest. If Delta gets me to Orlando on time, I’ll see you there.