Theo Gets Into the AI Nitty-Gritty
A new AI-for-MSP startup touts its insider's familiarity with LLMs as a competitive differentiator.
Anthropomorphism also crops up pretty regularly at Async Labs, the company responsible for an agentic managed services automation tool named Theo.
“We’ve built what we call an AI technician,” says Sahil Thaker (pictured), Async’s co-founder and CTO. “It uses the brains from the AI models, but it has a lot of hands and legs, so to speak, that are custom to us.”
Those custom elements are what elevate Theo above generic chatbots, according to Async co-founder Abhinav Vora.
“A lot of products tend to be what people call wrappers around foundation models,” he says. “That’s great for many in many cases, but when that doesn’t work, which is a lot of the time, you have to actually get into the nitty-gritty and redo some of that stuff.”
Async’s developers have the know-how to perform that work, Vora continues, thanks to prior gigs at companies like Microsoft, Lyft, Uber, and AI search vendor Glean. “We can actually open up the engine and fix it and do whatever we want to do. That is not super uncommon, but it’s not common.”
And it’s equipped Async to build what Vora calls a domain-specific agentic AI solution tuned to the precise needs of an MSP’s service desk. “It understands what actions are safe and what is not safe,” he says. “It understands ticket types and all the different artifacts.”
It acts on that understanding autonomously in a lot of cases, too, but not in others.
“There are some things that you don’t want the AI to do because you don’t trust it entirely,” Thaker says. “When it’s trying to do remediation, you actually want the technician to give permission.”
Async, which is funded by Slow Ventures and South Park Commons among others, is about three to six months away from automating most Level 2 tickets with technician supervision and handling most Level 1 issues on its own, according to Vora, who says an agent that lives on endpoints is further out on the company’s roadmap.
“Why should you be in a place where there’s a problem and you file a ticket and only then do you get involved?” he asks. “You want to be in a place where you anticipate this laptop’s going to run out of memory or hard disk and let me just go clean it up.”
An additional future agent will automate security and network operations centers. “Running a NOC is a piece where I think we can do a fantastic job,” Vora says, because most of the work involves filtering away false positives.
Trickier but also on the way is automated integration functionality. Theo integrates now with PSA systems from ConnectWise, Kaseya, and NinjaOne, as well as Microsoft’s management stack, but a useful agentic app for MSPs needs access to a wider range of often obscure systems, many of which have no APIs.
“There will always be those one or two pieces of software that your dentist’s office has or your lawyer’s office has,” Vora says. “AI is getting smart enough where it can actually make sense of them and operate on top of that.”