Here’s How Pia Is Reducing Labor Costs For MSPs Using AI, RPA

‘Pia is an AI technology focused on your level one tasks, redundancy, the minutia, the noise of the day,’ says Tim Coach, Pia global channel chief. ‘This allows [staff] to do things that they enjoy and it allows you to get more out of them and help them move along in their career.’

When it comes to increasing productivity, saving time and reducing labor costs for MSPs, Pia says it has the answer.

Tim Coach, global channel chief for Tampa, Fla.-based automation vendor Pia, spoke at CRN parent company The Channel Company’s XChange 2024 conference in Orlando, Fla. last week about using AI vs. RPA (robotic process automation) and how it can significantly increase efficiency for MSPs.

RPA is the educated workflow whereas AI “makes the human decision in place of the human,” he said.

The vendor uses AI to streamline ticket resolution, increase profitability and reduce labor costs by leveraging client information to fill out forms and triage tickets.

“Pia is an AI technology focused on your level one tasks, redundancy, the minutiae, the noise of the day,” he said. “This allows [staff] to do things that they enjoy and it allows you to get more out of them and help them move along in their career.”

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Coach highlighted the pain points of MSPs experiencing rapid growth and the challenges of managing a large and diverse client base. To help with ever-growing MSP challenges, Pia leverages AI and RPA to automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency.

And it’s all about standardization and customization, Coach said.

When it comes to triaging help desk tickets, the AI engine goes beyond suggesting solutions and executes them, reducing human intervention. The system then automatically classifies tickets, populates resolutions and allows for clients to submit and manage their own tickets through a self-service portal.

“We use the AI to read the description, we read the description and not the summary,” he said.

Pia’s AI engine executes a script, which is always authorized by the MSP and then it’s resolved.

“It’s that easy, but not quite good enough,” he said. “We need to do better. We just triage everything for you. So as long as it's within our wheelhouse, we'll actually point the engine at the border, whatever you use for your clients tickets to come in, and it will automatically fill out type, subtype and item and pop up the resolution ready to go before the human ever sees it.”

There’s also an aspect of what he referred to as zero-touch automation in which a client can submit a ticket in a URL the MSP has extended to them “and by the time that a human first sees that ticket, it's completed.”

So when it comes to AI vs. RPA, Coach said it’s both.

“AI seek executions and then RPA when you got to manage the exception,” he said.

To save time on redundancies, Michael Cervino, co-founder and CEO of Radnor, Pa.-based MSP Circle Square Consulting, said Pia has one of the “more exciting products” his company is looking to implement.

“I think it's going to be game-changing for our business,” he told CRN. “They appear to be a much more fully featured product than their competitors, easier to implement and faster go live and go to market for us.”