Thread’s AI Voice Revolution (EP 930)

Hello friends, Uncle Marv here with another episode of the IT Business Podcast, coming at you from the Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, Florida. We are continuing on with coverage here at IT Nation Connect. And I am joined right now, if you notice, I didn't say who the show is presented by because that company is on the show today.

We are being presented every podcast episode here by Thread. Smarter Thread, Stronger Connections, all that stuff, connecting that matters. I'm here with co-founder and COO, Matt Linn.

Matt, how are you? I'm doing great, Uncle Marv. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on.

Although, I do need to ask this question. Who was the girl that was mean mugging me last night at the booth? Was it Kelly? Yeah, it was probably Kelly. Sounds like Kelly.

Yeah, so that was pretty interesting. Yeah. And was it her that made sure that you got up early enough to do this? No, no, that was my wife calling with our 10-month-old.

Oh, okay. You should be here doing this. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. So, we'll be bringing great gifts back from the Universal Studios gift store. Okay.

Nice. All right. So, how is the conference going for you so far? It's going really good.

Yeah. Other than unintentionally setting off the fire alarm, a lot of- Every vendor has to do something. We were getting a lot of eyes, as it was, but we got extra eyes after the fact.

So other than that, really great show. I think we've got a lounge, we've got a booth. One reinforces the pain, the other one shows the glorious future where all the pain goes away.

Yeah, that little lounge thing, first of all, it's not really a lounge. It looks like a fake attempt at a haunted house. Yeah, pretty much.

That's what it is. And all of the skeletons that you see in each little cubicle, they all died because they were working tickets. Gotcha.

And it's just a terrible, terrible thing to do. That's a terrible thing here. And of course, thank you guys for sponsoring the show for IT Nation here as part of the PitchIT program, of which you guys were the winner two years ago.

That's right. Yep. And so, two years removed now, I mean, life seems pretty good for you guys.

Yeah. We're continuing to grow really fast. We're coming up on 600 MSP partners globally today.

We think we'll be closer to 7, 750 by the end of the year. And the word's out a little bit. It used to be a lot of, wow, but I want to chat with my customers or I don't want to put AI in front of my customers.

People are coming to us and saying, my peer group is saying, I have to do this, otherwise we'll fall behind. And so, it's an awesome, awesome change, some tailwinds for us. It'd be nice if their clients were telling them that though.

Yeah. And it depends, right? I think it's all about the nature of the requests and making sure that your service set up, your service organization is facilitating the right ones in the right channel at the right time. Okay.

Now, for the most part, you guys have done all the traditional channels and stuff. You were doing Slack, you were doing the Teams, all of that stuff. Have you guys added anything new? Yeah.

So, we have a desktop app. That's not new. That's been out for a bit.

But yes, as of September at our own conference, AI Service Unleashed, it was the first annual one. We'll be running it back next year. Go ahead.

I'll ask afterwards. We announced a voice premium add-on product, so not only will an AI agent be able to pick up the phone and ask if it's an existing issue with all the contacts for that contact and that customer and creating a ticket right away, it'll also stream the conversation to that ticket and update the ticket in real time. The technician just focuses on providing an excellent experience and doing the work.

And the agent will make sure that all the data goes to where it needs to go and automates the back-end work for them. Now, is it the same agent or can I choose a voice? You can choose a voice. Nice.

Yep. So, we're using a product called Cartesia on the back-end. Okay.

So, if you want it to be your voice, we have a partner who literally, their CEO picks up every call as an agent, which is pretty cool. You can upload an MP3 of your voice and it'll answer as you. All right.

Very interesting. So, what is that? 11 labs where to learn your voice and do all that stuff? So, you guys have got that in? Yeah, Cartesia. Yep.

Nice. But yeah, super customizable. It can be kind of as just IVR as you need it to be.

Or if you want it to be really AI-forward, you can make it really AI-forward and a lot of customization in terms of the tone, the number of questions that it asks, when it hands off to a technician, or if it tries to resolve it end-to-end. And that's really what's in focus for us heading into 2026 is what percentage of no-touch tickets are we facilitating? Right. Now, that still obviously depends on your knowledge base and all of that stuff.

So, you've still got to have all your ducks in a row. Yeah, absolutely. And that was the other announcement that we made at the show that folks are really excited about.

We're calling it service intelligence. There's both a memory component and a knowledge component. The memory component will be at the contact level, the company level, and eventually the technician level.

So, with every closed request, it'll update that blueprint of the user and of the company. What devices do they have? Where do they normally work from? How do they prefer to be communicated to and where? Stuff like that that you wouldn't necessarily always have in a documentation platform. All right.

So, here's the question that I think some people would ask. Most CEOs, service desk managers, all of that stuff love it. Level one techs, maybe not so much.

So, have you had any feedback yet on what efficiency this does? Is it replacing a tech? Is it doing anything like that? Yeah. So, our big focus is on the service coordinator or dispatch role because it's a non-billable resource which impacts not productivity, but more so profitability because they're not able to bill for their time. What we recommend doing is we're able to take that technician and move them into a tier one type role or a project type role so you're supporting more business with the same team or you're able to do more projects with the same team.

Whatever makes most sense for the business, you're able to kind of lift and shift that resource as capacity, billable capacity elsewhere. Okay. All right.

Now, let's get back to the thought that triggered something in my mind. So, your partner conference, AI Service Unleashed. That's right.

I see that it's called the Premier User Conference, but it was your first one. It was. I usually scour, you know, my research teams looking for stuff.

I didn't hear about this. Yeah, it kind of happened organically. We have a weekly call of partners.

It's the one call you have to make a week if you believe in AI for service delivery in the channel. And so, I think we have 150 MSPs dialing in each week now. It's growing very quickly.

As a result of that popularity, we were like, well, why don't we have a show? And I think we gave it the green light two or three months before we actually hosted it. Okay. That's a pretty quick run up.

Yep. And you did it in Houston? Yeah, at the Space Center. At the Space Center.

At the Space Center. Now, here's the thing. Two to three months, how'd you swing that? So, they have a great events team there.

We got on their radar pretty quickly. Since we have a big sales office in Houston, we didn't have a lot of people traveling from our team. The trick was getting a lot of people to travel, our partners to travel to Houston in September.

It was pretty muggy. All right. How do you see that conference going forward? Yeah.

So, for us, it's not thread specific. It's AI specific. How do we help to accelerate learnings for people who are dabbling their toes? Or how do we further elevate those who are kind of experts in a few domain areas? And so, we're looking to partner with like-minded vendors and sponsors for breakout sessions and educational opportunities.

Really, it's going to be oriented around certification courses. So, how do we give a tangible asset for the folks who join us to take back to their team and further compound on those learnings? Interesting. So, like-minded AI companies.

So, we know that there's a ton coming into the space now. I'm not going to ask you about competition and stuff, but I am going to ask you about what I have seen outside of our space. There are companies now touting AI employees.

You can purchase a suite of employees for executive assistant, clean up your emails, social media manager, all of these things. How is that going to play into AI and what happens in our space? Yeah. We like to think that we're using AI to make service more human.

And so, for us, it's A, yes, we're definitely looking at multi-agent design patterns where the agents that we're building, the memory agent, the knowledge agent, the triage agent, the documentation agent. They're all able to communicate and problem-solve together based on the use case. And so, next year, we'll be looking at resolutions agents that will actually be doing more of the work through time.

All right. Cool. Cool product stuff.

So, it very much is like digital labor, if you think about it that way. Okay. All right.

So, let me ask you now another off-topic question. Everybody else is dressed up. Why aren't you? Yeah.

I left my pirate costume and my other suitcase, but I'll be fixing that today. Did you guys hire people just to walk around the showroom floor in costume? Nope. That was team members.

Okay. Yeah. So, we have 12 people here this year.

Oh, okay. Yeah. I didn't think it was that many.

Yeah. So, we do it big at IT Nation. Nice.

Very nice. All right. So, is there anything else new that I should know about, or shall we talk about something else? Yeah.

There are a couple of announcements coming out in a little bit that I can't quite break. Well, this won't release till next week. So... Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. So, we'll be announcing another round of financing.

Okay. The goal there is to... Wait a minute. You just had... You just raised... Can I say it? Yep.

Eight million? Yep. So, you got another one coming? Yep. Oh.

Yeah. So, we see some opportunities from a product perspective that we think would enable us to provide much more value much more quickly if we were able to pull some of those investments forward. Right.

And that's the goal. Now, people should know that that eight million, I mean, it's not going into employee pockets and stuff. I'm sure that a lot of that's going into dev work.

A lot of that's going into your cloud services to make things better, faster, because I have to imagine one of the things that, with the AI that I have dabbled with, the speed is key. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Any delay just doesn't feel good at all. And so, that's 100% right. The majority of the funds go right to research and development, so we're standing up two additional engineering pods with a designer and a product manager dedicated to elevating areas of the platform today, but what's around the corner.

Okay. So, speaking of cloud services, AWS has had a little couple of hiccups and stuff. Are you guys, did you get caught up in that or are you guys doing any private cloud stuff? Yeah, we definitely got caught up in that a little bit, thankfully because of the way that our platform is designed, we recognize that we have dependencies as it relates to PSA integrations and Teams integrations and Slack integrations, and so we figured out a pretty elegant way, a simple way to queue those things up for delivery when the dependency comes back up, so you don't lose any messages and there's no disruption of service.

We still work as the front end and it'll just write to the back end when everything comes back up. All right, because I do have a customer that's like, I'm not so sure we should be in the cloud. Yeah.

And I'm like, well, you got some stuff there already. Yeah. You know, your email and all of that, and they're like, yeah, but I don't want my data there because of that.

They want to be able to touch the rack to touch the device. Yeah, and it's a weird thing because it's almost either got to be hybrid so that it is local, you know, for their on-prem stuff, but cloud enough that when they're out of the office, they can access it. So that's the fear.

So that'll be interesting. All right. Sometimes you do see a little rebound from stuff like that where, I remember when I was first at the MSP where Mark and I met a lot of hedge funds and they very much were, you know, I made a bunch of money on this Windows 2003 machine, some of them, and I'm never touching it.

Like, I'm going to run this thing into the ground. Right. All right.

Speaking of Mark, I have not seen him. I see you. I see Bobby.

Where's Mark been? He's here. He is here. Yeah.

He showed up a little late. His wife just had their third child last week. Oh, man.

That's okay. So a little girl. Life is good when you're having babies.

Yeah. It's tiring, but good for sure. He's got a baby.

You've got a baby. Yeah. Yeah.

Oliver's 10 months now. 10 months. So you're starting to get some sleep now.

Well, yes. Yes. Some sleep.

A little regression, but yeah. But I think the last time I came on was for the holiday special, and that was literally like a week before he was born. Yeah.

And actually, I remember you saying, I don't know if I can make it. We might be at the hospital. We had our go back, but thankfully, he gave us the opportunity to chat.

All right. Well, Matt, thank you very much. We've got apparently something letting out, so people are moving about.

I don't know if you've got to get anywhere, but thanks for stopping by, and we'll chat soon. And again, thank you for the sponsorship for the conference. Awesome.

Of course. Thanks for having me on. All right.

That's it, folks. We'll be back with more from IT Nation in Orlando. See you soon.

Holla.