The 20 Hottest AI Software Companies: The 2024 CRN AI 100

The coolest AI software companies in 2024 include CrushBank, LogicMonitor, MSPbots, Rewst and more.

Virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence. AI for automating administrative IT tasks. And AI for generating code and content.

These are just some of the earliest use cases for AI software in improving operations within a solution provider business and creating an opportunity for a new revenue stream for solution providers once the AI offerings are ready for production within a customer’s environment.

In its inaugural AI 100, CRN is highlighting the work of these companies and more as solution providers continue to explore what AI means to their business and to customers.

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Top AI Software Companies To Watch

Research firm IDC predicts that enterprises will spend more than $38 billion worldwide on generative AI software and related infrastructure hardware and services, with the number reaching $151.1 billion in 2027 and achieving a compound annual growth rate of 86.1 percent from 2023 to 2027.

GenAI platform and application software will gradually overtake infrastructure by the end of the forecast period with a five-year CAGR of 99.6 percent, according to IDC.

Some of the vendors included on CRN’s coolest AI software list are:

As part of CRN’s inaugural AI 100 list, here are the 20 software companies that are taking AI to the next level.

Anaconda

Barry Libert

Vice Chairman, CEO

Anaconda bills itself as behind one of the most widely used and trusted data science and AI platforms on the market, and it offers a partner program for services partners, resellers and other partner business types.

The company recently expanded its collaboration with AI giant IBM, launched an AI incubator for advancing Python’s use in AI workloads, and made available a new integration with Microsoft Excel.

ConnectWise

Jason Magee

CEO

ConnectWise launched its Sidekick AI companion late last year and has continued to further advance AI across the portfolio.

The professional service automation vendor has leveraged AI and robotic process automation to improve search, on-boarding, device and client management, third-party integration and other actions with its tools.

CrushBank

Evan Leonard

CEO

CrushBank uses IBM Watsonx to provide IT services providers with an AI knowledge management system aimed at speeding up resolutions and reducing the number of escalations, among other benefits.

The company recently introduced the first closed large language model with full transparency and governance aimed at the imaging industry, with capabilities including ticket description and resolution summarization and ticket classification.

Cynomi

David Primor

Co-Founder, CEO

This startup’s AI-powered vCISO platform continuously assesses security postures, builds remediation plans and executes those plans to reduce risk.

Cynomi, founded in 2021, has a partner program for MSPs, MSSPs, consultancies and other partner business models.

Dataiku

Florian Douetteau

Co-Founder, CEO

Dataiku offers users development tools, prebuilt use cases and AI-powered assistants for building safe GenAI applications at enterprise scale.

The company also offers a partner program for resellers, service providers and other partner business types as part of the go-to-market for Dataiku’s brand of data preparation tools, machine learning model building and other capabilities.

DataRobot

Debanjan Saha

CEO

DataRobot brings a unified platform for GenAI and predictive AI, with enterprise monitoring and control and the ability to evaluate toxicity, sentiment, information leaks and other factors for models in production.

The company’s platform allows users to get real-time GenAI cost information, track data drift and accuracy by batch jobs and access public models added by DataRobot or administration, among other capabilities.

Hatz AI

Jimmy Hatzell

Co-Founder, CEO

Even before general availability of its products, Hatz AI has captured the attention of various MSPs with its promise of AI-as-a-service for MSPs and a $2.5 million seed funding round to help bring these offerings to life.

The startup, founded in 2023, will offer MSPs AI applications, AI agents, vector storage and custom LLMs to stand up an AI practice and offer customers managed AI assistants.

Intermedia

Michael Gold

Chairman, CEO

Intermedia’s communications suite is powered by AI, and late last year the company launched its Unite AI Assistant productivity tool to improve automation and information access as part of its Spark AI Technology suite.

The company will bring more AI and analytics capabilities to its Unite platform along with continued iteration on Spark AI.

Kaseya

Fred Voccola

CEO

Kaseya’s IT Complete suite uses an AI engine called Cooper to drive usage of its platform features to avoid wasted resources, alerting users to unused functions, workflows and time-saving integrations.

The company’s AI engine learns usage patterns over time, and Cooper Bots are on the road map to soon give MSPs more ways to orchestrate workflows and automate repetitive tasks.

LogicMonitor

Christina Kosmowski

CEO

A copilot for administrative tasks, unstructured log information analysis and alert correlation automation are among the ways LogicMonitor has embraced AI to take its hybrid observability platform to the next level.

The company has also incorporated AI in its LM Envision platform and has an IT operations (ITOps) AI offering called Dexda that brings in LogicMonitor and ServiceNow context for faster diagnosis.

MSPbots

Daniel Wang

Founder, CEO

From verifying time entries to reminding users to clock in and clock out, this startup’s bots and features seek to automate much of the tedious MSP tasks that take time away from complex issues in need of creative problem-solving.

MSPbots, founded in 2019, has added more innovations to its tools including further integration with Autotask, OpenAI and ConnectWise.

N-able

John Pagliuca

President, CEO

N-able has been exploring ways to incorporate GenAI into its software for solution providers, including allowing script creation based on prompts and leveraging existing private accounts with ChatGPT to keep data confidential.

The company is researching AI for improving password hygiene across clients among other use cases for the technology.

OpenText

Mark Barrenechea

Vice Chair, CEO, CTO

OpenText continues to add more GenAI technology across its portfolio, with its AI Cloud and Aviator Platform among its marquee offerings in this space.

The company’s AI Cloud brings sensitive data discovery and analytics for text, audio and other media. Its Aviator Platform, meanwhile, promises analytics at petabyte scale and empowers developer operations (DevOps), content creation, cybersecurity and other areas.

Pia

Gerwai Todd

CEO

A new leader and continued innovation in its autonomous platform for MSPs put Pia in a prime position to make its mark in AI.

The company recently installed Todd as its new CEO, integrating with another company he runs, TimeZest, and acquiring his AI triage product Triafy. Recent organic innovations from Pia include SmartForms, giving MSPs live interaction with customer forms based on their data.

Qualtrics

Zig Serafin

CEO

AI powers capabilities in Qualtrics’ software for customer frontlines and strategy and research, including AI-driven recommendations and analysis.

The experience management (XM) platform vendor can pull in information from calls, emails, chat and elsewhere for real-time insight to users’ frontline workers, in one example.

Rewst

Aharon Chernin

Founder, CEO

MSP-focused automation vendor Rewst wants to bring workflows to MSPs’ existing tools without the need for code or agents.

The company entered 2024 with a war chest of $31 million from a Series B round of financing and recently introduced the RoboRewsty OpenAI-powered virtual assistant for users.

SAP

Christian Klein

CEO

SAP’s AI copilot, Joule, has been rolling out since late 2023 and hitting more SAP products throughout 2024.

The enterprise application vendor has also updated Datasphere with copilot and vector database features and produced AI innovations aimed at the retailer customer experience, including predictive demand planning and predictive replenishment.

ServiceNow

Bill McDermott

Chairman, CEO

ServiceNow has partnered with major professional services firms including Genpact and EY to spread the use of AI.

The company is also front and center for various AI use cases, which include the StarCoder2 family of open-access LLMs for code generation created alongside AI heavyweights Hugging Face and Nvidia.

In February, ServiceNow agreed to buy NetACE to bring AI-driven digital workflows to telecommunications network life-cycle management.

SuperOps AI

Arvind Parthiban

Co-Founder, CEO

An AI-powered professional services automation and remote monitoring and management platform designed for MSPs is the promise of this startup.

SuperOps, founded in 2020, recently boosted its platform with automated networking monitoring scans, executive summary report creation and other updates. Upcoming features include AI-powered ticket summarization.

The vendor entered 2024 with a $12.4 million Series B round of funding dedicated to further improvements for its platform.

Ternary

Sasha Kipervarg

Co-Founder, CEO

Ternary leverages AI to provide users with insight, recommendations, anomaly detection and alerts related to spend across multi-cloud environments–with a dedicated financial operations (FinOps) product aimed at partners.

Founded in 2020, the startup promises a platform for rightsizing cloud spend and improving forecasting. It continues to iterate on its product, with recent introductions of a cost allocation feature, a new ability for configuring threshold alerting rules that bypass AI and machine learning algorithms.

A $12 million Series A financing round completed in October puts the vendor in good shape for continued investment in AI features.