AI Service Desk for MSPs | Bobby Jacobs

In this episode, Bobby Jacobs from Thread joins Rob Scott to discuss how AI is transforming the MSP service desk and why “death to the ticket” is becoming a reality.

He shares how MSPs can eliminate manual work through automation, embed AI directly into workflows, and improve both technician and end-user experiences—along with what’s next for AI-driven service delivery, including voice and omni-channel support.
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Talk Tech with Rob Scott.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Hello and welcome to the show. I'm your host, Rob Scott, and today I have a very special guest, my friend Bobby from Threads. Bobby, welcome to the show. Thanks, good to be here, Rob. Always a pleasure to see. You know, uh, since you came on the scene in the channel with Thread, I had an opportunity to see you up close and personal in the pitching competition. Yeah. Was so proud of you guys when you won that. Uh, what did you guys do with your 70,000 that you won in that contest?

SPEAKER_02 0:33

Yeah, we uh we dove into the channel, you know. We uh we do evolve along with you guys, uh, which I think the it's so important to be with MSPs in person, especially what we do is a lot of process change. Uh it's not that hard to use our tool. That's a big thing of what we do, but it is hard to change the way that a business has worked for a long time, especially when it's been a successful business. And so it's really important for us to be in person with our partners talking about what the future of the service desk looks like. Um and so, you know, sponsoring evolves helped us do that.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

That's really awesome. So, for those of you, those in the audience that don't know you as well as I do, why don't you give us a little background on your personal story? Where did you grow up and how did you get to where you are today?

SPEAKER_02 1:17

Sure. Uh yeah, so I'm from Houston, Texas. Uh my dad worked at NASA growing up. He negotiated contracts for the space station. So it kind of naturally got me into um figuring out how people can get value out of partnerships and sales. Um, I have an undergrad in entrepreneurship, so that kind of got me into like, I want to do cool things and build technology. Um, and I met the founders of Lionguard early on in my career in Houston. So that's what got me into the channel. Uh I kind of came up through Lionguard, love Joe and Vin and what uh they're doing over there. Um met the thread founders uh about three, four years ago, Mark and Matt, also incredible founders, and uh they were talking about death to the ticket. Uh that sounded pretty cool to me. And so it's it's been a fun ride, man. We you know we've gone from a couple dozen MSPs using our platform to over 700 today. Uh, and uh yeah, it's been good.

SPEAKER_01 2:14

That's an amazing, amazing story. When when you say death to the ticket, I know what you mean because I've seen your demos and your presentations, but but tell the audience why death to the ticket is an important uh concept or or or mission and and how thread is facilitating that.

SPEAKER_02 2:34

Yeah. You know, MSPs are service providers, and ideally they're providing great service that end users love, and the technician should be having a good time so that they can pass that experience down. And tickets are the worst. Like doing time entries, all these MSPs walking past us, every single person hates doing time entries, hates setting the priority and category of tickets and writing titles and doing all of this manual stuff that gets in the way of actually providing good service. So when we say debt to the ticket, the dirty secret is we're not actually getting rid of the ticket, but we're automating all the terrible things a ticket makes somebody do.

SPEAKER_01 3:14

And and I remember your demo, uh, you showed your AI tool, and this is years ago. I'm sure it's evolved tremendously, and the whole audience started clapping. Yeah. And so for me, you guys were one of the first in the channel to really be AI forward, to really be uh really focusing on automation. And it turns out, by the way, ticket deflection is a huge concept, not just in managed services, but in AI general. I tell people today start with the small wins. What is AI good at? Yeah. Start thinking about ticket deflection. It's a great thing to think about, not just for MSPs, but for legal services. You know, we our AI bots now handle our legal support questions, and we're trying to do the same thing as what you guys are thinking about is like resolve as much as you can with automation and then escalate to the humans for the more complicated things. But but how did you guys get the confidence that you could actually deliver the the solutions that you needed with AI and what challenges have you had with uh AI with things like size limits and and hallucination and some of the well-known challenges with AI? How has Thread navigated those challenges so successfully?

SPEAKER_02 4:36

Well, it moves super quickly, and so part of it is what is what are the challenges of AI today? There's a lot of things like everyone talks about when Samsung accidentally released all of their uh knowledge into Chat GPT. Like that doesn't really happen anymore, right? People are really afraid of like, oh, all my data is gonna go public. And you certainly need to think about that from a legal perspective. You probably know more than anybody, but most of that's been solved. Like, data isn't going to accidentally leak other places, but we went through that journey, like we were really focused on solving those things early with the technology that we were building. Now that stuff just kind of solved itself, and so as AI is progressing, staying up to date with it, that's one of the most important things. From a you know, actually launching products that helps people and that works for businesses. Everybody knows the Harvard Business Review study that said 82% of AI projects fail today and don't provide real value. Now, 60% of IT projects fail. So when you put that into comparison, it's not as bad as it sounds, but most of that is AI that's not actually in workflows. That's saying, hey, here's Microsoft Copilot, here's ChatGPT, go use it. And then people, you know, might use it some, but it's not fundamentally changing the way they work or changing a workflow. I think ideally, someone doesn't know they're using AI. Soon people are gonna say, you used to write time entries, like LAM lines used to exist. You know, it's just like that's crazy because you just click a button and it writes it. You don't have to think about that that's AI doing it, it's just how your tooling works and that's the workflow that you work in. Yeah. There's lots of things like that where AI is being provided or implemented in a way that people are just using and it makes sense. So that's how we think about it. It starts with focusing on the user journey and what people do that they don't like doing, and how can you just make it easier without them having to think about it?

SPEAKER_01 6:33

Yeah. And I think architecture is a big issue. It's like once you get in out of the open systems like Copilot and ChatGPT, start thinking about closed systems with RAG and the right architecture. Yeah, now your capabilities and your accuracy go way up. I yeah was beating my head up against the wall for a year and a half with trying to build pilot with these open platforms. Yeah, once we got our same instructions, KBs and everything into the right architecture, sure, now suddenly outcomes improve tremendously. And the one thing that I think is interesting with AI right now is it's just AI for AI's sake. Yeah, yeah. It's AI powered, is intrinsically some value in that. Yeah. Whereas before in IT, we always matched the tool to the use case. 100%. If someone needed to store something, we didn't offer them an Oracle database if it could be in a SQL, a MySQL database or in a spreadsheet. That's right. We we we fit the work to the problem, yeah. And I think that's gonna be the next wave of what happens with agencai AI. Yeah. My platform, for example, when you build an agent, you can pick from any large language model you want. Why? Because we're starting again and understanding that all these language models are good at different things. Totally. And so just like with people, yeah, when we deploy assets with agentic AI, we're gonna have the right work map to the right LLMs.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

It's not gonna be one size fits all. Well, that's an important point. When you have all the different LLMs you can choose from, you don't want to make a user become an AI engineer or have to do all the research. So I imagine when you have all that, it sounds like you're saying, hey, we recommend this model for this use case, this model is gonna be here.

SPEAKER_01 8:26

Yeah, so we have uh autonomous selection based on price and uh quality. Got it. So if the customer wants it to automatically pick the lowest price uh LLM that can get the job done, it'll pick that one. If it wants, if the customer wants uh the best LLM for the job, regardless of price, that's a different setting. Yeah, but we do have the ability to auto-select based on the query and decide or override, and you can, you know, you could pick the LLM and turn the auto-select off.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

And guiding the user is so important. Like when you think about MSPs, they're service providers, they're not software development companies. You you don't want to build a tool where they have to have a full-time person smart in AI to manage it. So telling them, hey, if you want this, click these buttons, answer these questions, you're gonna get this outcome. Like the UX is so important to help end users and MSPs get the automation into their workflow because they're busy. Like every MSP is onboarding multiple tools, trying to solve problems, have customer issues, trying to grow their business, and you have to make it so that they can become more efficient and stay efficient without having to grow their team significantly, uh, which I think is a big challenge you're seeing in AI today.

SPEAKER_01 9:50

Yeah, I want to shift gears a little bit to marketing. Okay. Because I've always admired you as a marketer, uh, a little outlandish. Sure. Uh a little um um different, okay. Unique. Uh your people We would say radical. Radical. Your people show up in pirate suits and costumes, yeah. You know, you have elaborate booths that you know you spend six months planning. Um where did all that come from? You guys are so unique in that approach. What's the thinking behind that and and where does it come from?

SPEAKER_02 10:26

Well, being radical is a core value of thread. So that's where it starts. Uh one of our founders, Mark Alive, he is probably the most radical person I know. And we start by saying, what's the most radical thing that we can do? And it's because being radical breaks the mold, it helps you do things that you wouldn't otherwise do, which is what's needed in IT today. Like you can keep running the same way, but if we do that, that's not a happy story for the future. Like we have to radically shift the way the service is provided. So we think about okay, we are helping MSPs radically shift the way they provide service. How do we, in a radical way, help them know about us? Because if the answer is spend $10 million on marketing, we're not going to be able to build a lot of product, right? We'd rather spend more money on the product. And so if we can dress up in pirate costumes and do parades and do do live tattoos at our booth and break rooms, that ultimately is to help the MSP know about us and give us opportunities to tell MSPs about how they can be better for the future. Um, you know, not everybody loves wearing costumes in public. I love being a pirate, but uh you got to figure out how to how to let people know about the good news of automation.

SPEAKER_01 11:41

Yeah, well, that's uh it's very effective. And you know, I I I'm I'm friends with Tahir from MSP Camp.

SPEAKER_02 11:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:48

And and he was one of the pitchett guys as well. Yeah. Expert in marketing. And he says to everybody, Rob, if it's not outrageous, your word radical, it doesn't stand out in this crowded, noisy world.

SPEAKER_02 12:02

100%.

SPEAKER_01 12:02

That's why I wear orange jacket.

SPEAKER_02 12:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Right? Because if I'm just walking down the hall in my blue pullover that I always wear, yeah, nobody notices. Yeah. And so what I think you guys have mastered and to hear really understands is in this new world marketing disease and millennials, being outrageous is a way to start the conversation. Yeah. Old school guys like me are like, no one would take me serious if I was in a pirate costume. Yeah. But but you guys have proven you can do serious work, have a lot of fun, uh, take a different approach to sales and marketing, and I admire you guys for that. You guys are in an interesting point, I'm assuming, recently coming out of the Valley of Death based on the numbers that you've talked about, and uh moving in a new direction and radically trying to change uh an industry like many that are about to shift dramatically. Uh, what is in the roadmap for thread for 2026?

SPEAKER_02 13:03

Things are moving so fast, and we are definitely pouring gas on the fire to move faster. Uh, you know, auto dispatch. We've always done triage, auto dispatch is huge, end user verification. We just launched a voice product. I have phones burning on my shirt. Uh AI voice so that it can just talk to your customers, transcribe the call in real time, do all the triage work, do the time entry, pass it to the right person, solve problems. Like true omni channel is huge. If you have AI automation on your back end, that's great. But if it's not engaging with the customer, it's not a full AI strategy for an MSP. It has to be holistic, it has to be customer-facing. And so voice was kind of the last frontier omnichannel for us. Um, we'll continue to go from there.

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Big believer in in AI voice systems. Uh, I joke with people and say if I was going to start an IT services business today, it would have voice in the name.

SPEAKER_02 13:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

Just because it makes the point about uh Gen AI and voice assistance and the impact that they're having so quickly. Yeah. Uh we use them at Monger. They're not perfect. Sure. They they they often screw up, but humans aren't perfect. No. But at least they answer the phone every time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

I'm the second round. I can open my ChatGPT app and talk to them whenever I want, and it knows everything.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

It's really cool. So those things are are really interesting. Uh as far as um uh expansion. Are you guys gonna expand globally? Are you gonna stay in North America? What's your uh expansion plans as you move forward?

SPEAKER_02 14:35

We work with a number of MSPs in Australia, New Zealand, all over Europe. Um that we love working with Dutch MSP and such, but we haven't put a lot of focus into it. So we certainly will put more focus into Europe and A and Z next year. We do a ton of business in Canada. Um, you know, we want to help MSPs. You do have to use ConnectWise Auto Task or Halo to use our solutions, so that's kind of where we go.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

That's lots of people in those categories. That's right. The big the big players. Um uh in terms of you personally, um, what is your big sort of aha moment from 2025? And what are you looking forward to most personally for 2026?

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, we're growing as a company, so we're our staff is a lot bigger. Uh, helping people reach their opportunities when you can promote somebody that came in entry level, there's not a lot better than that. So we've gotten to do that a number of times this year, which has been really cool. I think the other side is helping our partners. Like, we've always done that this year in IT Nation. It just felt like a new level of our partners coming up to our booth, just really excited about the impact that we're making on their business. It wasn't just feature requests and bugs that we needed to fix. So making impacts in people's businesses, like then it spreads like wildfire. Um, and that's what we're seeing. So I think those are two big takeaways for me this year that it's just help it goes back to helping people, you know.

SPEAKER_01 16:03

And I don't know if you set new year's resolutions or or if you don't, but what are some of your goals uh personally for next year?

SPEAKER_02 16:11

Yeah, it's to help a lot of people on our team grow into new roles, absolutely. Um you know, we want to work with probably 1500 MSPs by the end of the year, next year. Uh so very excited uh to help a lot more MSPs. And you know, I spend most of my time doing things with threads, so that is very personal to me and uh and what's going on there. Um yeah, I I think that's a lot of it.

SPEAKER_01 16:37

That's awesome, and and I'm sure they're grateful for that. Um, in in terms of um MSPs, what are the MSPs that other than being on those three platforms, ConnectWise Halo and what was the auto auto task with Kaseya? Um what are the other characteristics of the MSPs that thread can help the most?

SPEAKER_02 17:02

Yeah, first they they need to want to grow or be growing for sure. If an MSP is a lifestyle business and they're really happy with it. I don't know if the future is great for them, but thread's probably not super helpful. Um I mentioned thread is a bit of process change, they have to be willing to change, they have to be willing to have a ticket land somewhere else, to intake a ticket differently, to maybe even work in a different interface. And so that can be hard. Like people don't like change just inherently. Uh so the more that the leadership at an MSP is on board with putting AI into their service desk and becoming an AI business, that's gonna be the best partner for us to work with. And luckily, a lot of MSPs are on board with that.

SPEAKER_01 17:45

That makes sense. That makes good sense. Um, ladies and gentlemen, my good friend Bobby from Thread, thank you for being on the show.

SPEAKER_02 17:54

Thanks, Rob.

SPEAKER_00 17:55

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