PIA’s Automation Revolution for MSPs (EP 931)

Hello, friends. Uncle Marv, back with another episode of the IT Business Podcast here at IT Nation. And this episode is presented by Thread Service Magic for your service desk.

Right now, I am joined by a company that you've had on the show before, but this is the first time that I am speaking with James Allen, the Chief Community Officer over at PIA. James, welcome to the show. Omar, thanks for having us. 

It's great to be here. It's good to be here. I do want to say, your booth was popping when I went by there.

So, how's the show been for you guys? Yeah, it's been busy. I said to the guys last night, this is our third year in market, and we launched effectively three years ago at IT Nation here in Orlando. And back then, AI was this mystical, magical, woo-woo technology that MSPs weren't too thrilled about, to be honest.

And now, fast forward to today, and I look around, and half the agenda is AI in the agenda, and half of the vendors out there have got AI slapped on them. So, needless to say, I think we're in the right space now. Yeah. 

Well, so let me ask you a question based on that. How does it feel now? Do you like the fact that you are one of the first to the market, or do you get frustrated now that everybody's jumping on? Oh, look, it's a good question. I definitely like that we're one of the first in the market.

So, we're seen as that trusted AI advisory technology in the space. That's definitely been validated by our partner base, which is hundreds of partners now across the globe. Frustrated around other people slapping it on? No, I think just that awareness now is bringing more eyeballs into the technology.

MSPs are smart enough to sift through the chafe and see what's actually going to move the needle for them. And if it's not really solving a business problem, then it can just be that shiny tool that we've seen in this space for a long time. Okay. 

Are you getting any feedback from MSPs about how their customers see AI? And the example I would use is a lot of my clients, they love using AI for research and doing stuff, but they're kind of hesitant to use AI when it comes to service desk or having AI talk back to them and stuff like that. What type of feedback are you hearing about that? Yeah, it's funny you say that, Marv. So, tomorrow my breakout session is titled, I gave AI a ConnectWise login and it didn't break anything, but it fixed a whole heap.

And that's basically off the back of that sentiment. So, yes, AI is definitely being adopted in our day-to-day. Everyone's using ChatGPT or CoPilot.

But when you start to give the keys to the kingdom, people can be definitely a lot more hesitant, a lot more cautious, and rightfully so. So, we're definitely trying to, and we have been trying to educate the community that if we do it in a concerted, concise, thoughtful manner, we can have magical results. You've got a philosophy at PIA where it's the qual walk, run approach.

Are you having to do that with MSPs a lot or are you using that to teach MSPs how to address their customers? Yeah, absolutely. And I'm not going to claim that as something that we came up with ourselves. I think it's pretty comprehensive for any new type of technology or something new in market.

But we definitely like that crawl, walk, run approach because we need to get the foundations right, get people comfortable, get the technology working and showing that immediate impact. And then when they get on that journey, their team starts to appreciate it. They're not being scared by the technology.

They're embracing it. And then they're off to the races and they can start building and customizing and having significant results. Okay.

So, it's been a while since I've had PIA on, actually, back when Coach was with you guys. So, tell me what things have been new to PIA? I know that you guys have, I don't know, about, what, 60 automations built into the service desk? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, when we talk about those 60 plus automations, think of those as like a ticket resolving workflow.

It's going to do it end to end in a lot of those cases across multiple client environments. So, that has been one of our missions from the start around how do we make that help desk more scalable, more consistent, more efficient. But as the platform and the team has grown and matured, we've started to branch out a lot more.

And where in the early days, a lot of our partners, they didn't have those automation engineers or development resources on staff. So, they really loved the fact that PIA was out of the box, ready to go, pre-built for an MSP. Now, with the, I guess, demand in market, we've got a lot more of our partners wanting to customize, wanting to build their own automations, wanting to bring technologies into the platform.

And the fortunate thing for us is we've had that in mind from the very start. So, it's been built and architected as a full development orchestration platform with all of that capability innately in there. So, now we're more and more opening up different componentry of the platform to allow those MSPs to go and customize, bring in different technologies and automate more than just the help desk.

Right. Now, that still falls in line with your vendor agnostic approach. Absolutely.

So, it's not like you're tied to a specific PSA or a specific technology. You guys are pretty much available to everyone. Yeah, and we had that approach at the very start because coming from an MSP, we knew we didn't want to have all of our eggs in one basket.

If someone changes technologies or finds best in breed somewhere else, we didn't want to be pigeonholed into saying, oh, we only support this technology, this tool stack, and you can't move it. And that's, I'm seeing that feedback come when partners are coming across from other platforms. They're just stuck.

So, definitely having that vendor agnostic approach to give that flexibility to our MSP partners. Okay. Did I see a news story about you guys with ThreatLocker where you're now a part of their ecosystem? So, your stuff is automatically approved so that things don't get blocked? Yeah.

I think you're referring to our agent. So, we've been agent-based since inception. We actually started working with the RMM tools, ConnectWise and Casaya, and very quickly, they told us we were wasting our time.

And the problem that we had when we were using the RMM for our automation was the polling nature. It was pinging every 30, 60, 90 seconds. Right.

And it would really blow out the workflow. So, we built a very small, lightweight agent to go and execute on the PowerShell scripts. And obviously, that's a concern with any MSP.

We knew we didn't want another agent to manage in the workspace, but we did it out of necessity. Now, obviously, there's a lot of security that we came to market with. And one of those things around the agent is being a globally whitelisted application with ThreatLocker.

So, every time we release a new update to the agent, it gets approved and vetted through ThreatLocker. So, you've got no concerns there. Okay.

Yeah. Great. Because I use ThreatLocker.

Yeah. A lot of MSPs do. They're great.

All right. Anything else that you guys, did you do any major announcement here? Yeah, we will. So, tomorrow in our presentation, we'll be launching a couple of new developments on the platform.

So, one of them, which our partners are very excited about, is our automation hub. And think of that like an automation marketplace. So, a lot of our partners have built different automations and integrations over time, which either they've done by themselves or we've helped them along the way.

And it doesn't make sense to put those automations in everybody's tenant because it might not be useful to them. So, what we've built is effectively a marketplace for our MSPs to go in and find things that we've built custom for other MSPs, either extensions, smart forms, chatbot automations, integrations, that they can go and search, plug into their tenant, and at the click of a button, activate and scale across their whole client base. So, that's been a massive win for our partners that are doing some custom build.

And the second piece on that same vein around the development enablement is our vibe coder or think of it like a co-pilot for automation engineers. So, we've basically, the guys have put an MCP server together and ingested all of our documentation and script technology for an automation engineer to go and prompt it as you would like a chat GPT in natural language. And instead of text coming back, our tool will now go and build you PR scripts for the activities in PowerShell and also the YAML config file to complete a full workflow end-to-end.

So, natural text to pay a bill workflows and then you can push that straight into your PA tenant. So, if anyone is coding and building workflows on the PA platform today, which a lot of MSPs are doing, this just cuts down hours  worth of work of having to put together the line-by-line code to build out their workflows. Okay.

I know that you guys do a lot of stuff inside the community and people can share stuff. Most of what I've heard about the AI automation is that your documentation has to be spot on. But what I'm also starting to hear, and I don't know if you guys are doing this or not, where community members are able to share knowledge bases with the platform for other people to use.

Is that something you guys are doing? Yeah, it's a great question. So, a couple of things on that. We've got a Discord server that's spun up for our PA partners that are that way inclined in that dev space.

They're definitely sharing best practice, code and script to build out workflows. I had one of the guys, I noticed Thread is a sponsor of your podcast. One of our partners had built a Thread integration with their chatbot and PA, shared that in our Discord community.

When it comes to documentation and ingesting that into AI models, that isn't something that we've done traditionally to date. And the reason behind that is all of PA's workflows, all of our automation, so think of it like a ticket workflow to do it end-to-end, that process has been documented by us in PA. So, it's already done.

So, your standard operating procedure has been built out and then also documented. And that also gets pushed into something like an IT group as well. So, not only are we automating the process, we're documenting it at the same time.

Okay, very nice. You guys are cranking. I was going to ask you, with all the other folks coming into AI stuff here, how do you guys stay out front and relevant and that sort of stuff? But you guys seem to be doing pretty good.

Look, the technology is moving at a rate of knots, as you know. Right. And we are all in with AI.

We have been since inception. And more and more, we're putting more R&D, more research, more resources into that. So, we want to be known as the partner that our MSPs can trust in the space when it comes to AI.

Not just around automation, but we're seeing people with building out data lakes and putting the knowledge bases in there like you just mentioned. So, we'll definitely be coming to market with a lot more things in the near future. And that's what we want to be known in the market is that AI service provider that MSPs can trust.

Okay. All right. So, back to the conference here.

Did you get a look at the Google dolls? Fantastic having them play on site. It's incredible what ConnectWise can do. They've got some pull, I tell you.

Yeah, it works. And plans for Universal? I can't wait. I was there last year.

I'm a big kid at heart, Marv. I've got three young kids of my own, and they keep me young. But to go to a theme park at night with no one, no lining up, I mean, it doesn't get much better for me.

I love that. It is nice. So, I forget, you're not, where are you guys located? So, in the States, we're all remote.

So, we have a bit of a base here in Tampa, in Florida. Okay. Around Tampa, there's about half a dozen of us.

There's about, there's 50, just over 50 now globally. And, yeah, in the States, we're all remote. I'm based out of Salt Lake.

Our CEO is in LA. And, yeah, a lot of teams in Australia still. All right, because I was going to see if you were local because, of course, everybody that's, you know, from out of town, the families are, you know, a bit upset that they're going to Universal and not bringing the families.

I definitely didn't tell my kids I was doing that. So, up until about three months ago, I was based locally in Tampa, Florida. So, we were out here for a couple of years.

So, our kids have definitely seen a good chunk of those theme parks. So, what range are the kids? 10, 8, and 4. So, they're getting ready for snow season now in Salt Lake City. Really? Yeah.

I didn't think about snow in Salt Lake. Oh, yeah. So, that means that you'll be out there next year when PAX 8 Beyond shows up.

Absolutely. Will you be at that conference? Yeah, 100%. Okay.

What's a conference like in Salt Lake City? I have no idea. Well, I don't either. I've never been to one.

So, we'll find out together. Do they have them? Apparently, they do. Okay, I'll have to see.

And maybe we'll look you guys up. James, thank you very much for stopping by. Appreciate it.

And appreciate what PIA has been doing, helping MSPs with their AI service base. And good luck. Marv, it's been a pleasure.

Thanks for having us on. All right. Thank you, sir.

And that'll do it, folks. And we'll be back with more from IT Nation here in Orlando. Until then, holla.