Pia Takes MSPs to the Couch on Agentic AI
The AI for MSPs software maker is rolling out autonomous service desk functionality only as quickly as MSPs are psychologically prepared to accept it.
While Shield and Titan build radically new software/services hybrids, Pia is bringing AI to MSPs the old-fashioned way. How they’re going about it—slowly—and why are both very interesting.
To be clear at the outset, Pia could be most of the way toward selling fully autonomous agentic AI (a la Atera) to MSPs right now if it wanted to. It just doesn’t think there would be a lot of buyers.
“From a psychological perspective, the technology has progressed significantly faster than humans are ready for,” says David Schwartz (pictured in black), the company’s CEO on an interim basis since February and permanently since June. “So we put things in place that ultimately kept the technician heavily involved, knowing that we actually didn’t necessarily need to do that, but it was what allowed technicians to feel comfortable and the C-suite to feel comfortable as well.”
Though Pia’s SmartForms feature, introduced nearly two years ago, can handle a limited range of tasks entirely on its own, most automations diagnose issues, determine how best to respond, and then present the results to a technician. “By the time they get to the ticket, everything’s prepped, ready to go with a recommendation of what needs to be done,” Schwartz says. All they have to do is click an approval button.
“Where we’re going,” Schwartz adds, “is if an MSP decides to not have a technician in the middle or a human in the loop, we can remove that functionality.”
Pia’s partner success managers and developers, who spend a lot of time talking with users to gauge their readiness for that fully agentic future, are detecting signs of movement in that direction. “Just in the last six months, we’ve seen a notable shift,” Schwartz says. “MSPs are finally looking at and understanding that the need to do something is more important than ever before.”
As a result, he continues, it won’t be long before autonomous agents will be table stakes in service desk technology. In anticipation of that day, Pia’s actively at work on an expansion to its platform that looks beyond the service desk.
“Tool sprawl is a serious challenge and obstacle,” Schwartz explains. “What we’re doing is creating the mechanism for you to bring any tool that you need to into the environment and very, very easily integrate it.”
But also automate it, without advanced coding. “Where it’s going is really an orchestration layer for MSPs,” Schwartz says.
It’ll get there soon, apparently. “We’re close. I mean, we’re very, very close,” Schwartz says. “We will be releasing it over the next few months.”
That will just be the latest step in what’s been a long journey for the company. Hard to believe now, but as recently as two years ago Pia was one of a very few vendors even beginning to put AI to work for MSPs. These days it faces competition from both platform players like ConnectWise and Kaseya and startups like Cyft, Thread, and zofiQ (not to mention Everest, Mizo, and Theo, all of which I’ll be writing about in around two weeks). Nic Ferraro, Pia’s CRO (pictured in white above), isn’t terribly intimidated.
“There’s many upstarts that now are jumping onto the bandwagon,” he observes. “We have about seven years of development in this to centralize our ethos around saving the MSP money and improving their unit economics.”