I made a whole lot of comments about generic RPA tools in a recent post about service desk automation startup Neo Agent without, you may have noticed, once mentioning the most familiar maker of RPA tools for MSPs, Rewst.
That’s because Rewst hasn’t been a generic RPA tool maker since June when it shipped a radically new version of its product that builds automations for users on demand in response to natural language prompts. The goal, as I wrote at the time, was to democratize RPA by allowing people who’ve never met an automation engineer, let alone trained to become one, build their own workflows unassisted. The question three months later is, has it?
According to Rewst, yes.
They can’t prove it yet, mind you, but they do have circumstantial evidence. Until a couple weeks ago, when the new version of the platform went GA, there were about 110 MSPs, which is roughly 10% of Rewst’s partner base, running an early access edition of the system. During a single 30-day span, the company says, those users created an average of 150 new workflows per day, which is about twice as many as other users averaged over the same span.
And when I say “other users,” I mean all other users, combined. All 90% of Rewst partners not in the early access cohort collectively produced about 75 automations per day during that 30-day period. The 10% using the new tool collectively created 150. Which doesn’t establish conclusively that amateurs are now building automations for the first time, but sure implies something about the system has gotten a whole lot simpler.
“Our theory is if people are creating more automations on the platform, it must be easier,” says Aharon Chernin (pictured), Rewst’s CEO.
The next three questions about the new platform, of course, are how soon do other Rewst partners adopt it, do they see the same giant uptick in automation building, and are some of those automations created by people formerly unqualified to automate? In the meantime, a few other things make the early access results interesting:
1. AI is becoming Rewst’s primary interface. About 80% of early access automations were built from directly inside ChatGPT, Claude, or another LLM via Rewst’s MCP server rather than the system’s traditional interface. That mirrors a trend Syncro predicted earlier this year and that TD SYNNEX reported more recently. It also suggests that large numbers of MSPs are embracing chatbots as their primary pane of glass, something that felt a little out there when I first speculated about it 15 months ago, at a far faster clip than lots of people expected. Including Rewst.
“We thought it’d be something that would happen six to twelve months from now,” says Chernin, adding that Rewst is shifting development resources from the system’s web interface to its AI one in response.
“It’s become really clear where we need to spend our time,” he notes.
2. AI is becoming Rewst’s primary customer. Well, not exactly. MSPs are still the ones buying and paying for Rewst’s software. But as far as Chernin can tell, partners aren’t asking Claude to build an automation using Rewst. They’re asking Claude to build an automation, period, and Claude is choosing Rewst as the simplest way to do so.
“The MSP isn’t using the product. Claude is,” Chernin says. Which (per an earlier post) means Rewst has to think about keeping agents satisfied these days at least as much as it thinks about keeping partners satisfied.
“When an MSP says, ‘Hey, make me this automation,’ the agent’s not going to pick your product unless you actually make the agent’s life easier,” Chernin observes.
That’s something for anyone rolling out MCP servers or headless versions of their software to consider.
Determinism isn’t dead
Neo Agent, as we saw separately, foresees MSPs relying less on deterministic scripting and more on AI in the future. So, it’s worth noting, does Rewst. Indeed, that’s a core design principle in the new version of its product.
“Rewst can be as deterministic or non-deterministic as you want it to be. You just need to tell your agent what you want,” Chernin says. If that’s an old-school RPA flow, ask for it. If it’s something more like Neo Agent, ask for that instead.
“If you can describe it and define it, you can build it,” Chernin says.
Still, Chernin doesn’t expect deterministic workflows to disappear anytime soon. “There’s always going to be tasks that require determinism,” he says, highlighting compliance-related ones in particular.
“When an auditor comes in and says, ‘Show me your processes for doing X, Y, and Z,’” he observes, you’d better have an answer other than “we don’t have processes.”