How You'll Get Future Tech Support

I wrote a guest article for the MSP Summit titled For AI, MSPs Need to Head to Higher Ground. It was written for other IT providers. This is the version for our clients, because the same shift changes how your team will get help.

The argument of the article: AI-first support companies will eventually sell directly to businesses like yours. The help desk work that IT providers built their recurring revenue on (passw

ord resets, disk space, memory problems, the request that gets a ticket number and a same-day reply) is the first thing automation will absorb. The providers that last will move up to project work and real consulting.

Here is what that means for the person at your company who needs help.

No more tickets

The AI startups we meet in San Francisco (some are our clients) find the idea of a user filling out a ticket form funny. Their model is a direct message in Slack or Teams to a bot that resolves most requests on the spot. Once your staff has used that, they will not go back to a form and a queue.

"Same day" becomes "right now"

Service level agreements were written for a world where a human had to pick up the request. When the first response is automated, the acceptable wait drops to seconds. Response-time SLAs stop being a selling point, and an automated tool will not close a ticket early to protect a metric.

Routine work gets cheaper, then free

Resetting a password, clearing a full disk, reinstalling an app: these will be bundled into the tools you already pay for, the way spell check is bundled into a word processor. Paying a monthly fee per computer for that category of work will look expensive very quickly. Mann has never charged per computer per month for support, and this is one reason why.

The hard work gets more valuable

What automation does not do well is work that needs judgment: deciding which AI tools your company should allow, setting rules for how your data moves through them, measuring whether they are helping, and fixing the problem that spans three vendors and that nobody owns. That is where an IT partner earns its fee.

What Mann is doing about it

We are not bolting a chatbot onto the front of our help desk and calling it done. We are moving routine requests to automation where it is reliable, keeping people on the problems that need them, and spending more of our time helping clients deploy AI in their own operations with governance, observability, and a way to measure the result.

The full article is here: For AI, MSPs Need to Head to Higher Ground.

Harold Mann is the founder and president of Mann Consulting, a San Francisco IT consultancy founded in 1991 that supports over 20,000 devices globally.