The Power of Pia: Utilizing AI for Helpdesk Consistency

The largest growing technology trend across industries has been automation and AI, with no plans of slowing down. A new report by TD SYNNEX found that just 23 percent of channel businesses said they closed no deals involving AI.

IT services and consulting company Pia has outlined a clear mission: Empower MSPs and IT service desks to utilize AI to optimize their operations. Born out of a large managed service provider, Pia focuses on making help desks more scalable, consistent and profitable.

Through its aiDesk, a globally patented AI-led automation platform that integrates with an organization’s existing IT service management tools, Pia is helping companies take an AI-first approach to boosting efficiency through process optimization.

Benefits of Pia’s solution

Pia’s AI helpdesk solution features multifaceted benefits, starting with efficiency.

“One of the main benefits is the ability to close tickets faster,” said James Allen, Global Senior Vice President of Sales at Pia, in a conversation with Channel Insider. “When MSP staff utilize Pia to do their job, they can close dozens of tickets a day. We’re empowering resources on the help desk to close volumes of tickets that they wouldn’t have closed before, such as dispatchers, interns, and new starters.”

By streamlining processes and improving operational efficiencies, the benefits aren’t just realized by the MSP alone. It frees up time for the MSP to focus on other areas of their business, as well commit more resources to ensuring that they’re meeting client needs.

Allen says that their MSP partners are taking resources that would typically get caught up on the help desk– doing repetitive tickets such as password resets, onboardings, and offboardings– to instead go and do high-payoff tasks and projects within security, infrastructure, and jobs that they love to do.

“Another great benefit of the tool, within the MSPs help desk, is consistency,” said Allen. “We have automation for ticket resolution so those tickets are now getting done the right way the first time.”

“I was speaking with an MSP owner a couple of weeks ago and they’ve got 17 people on the help desk. When a new user ticket comes in, he says it gets done 17 different ways. That’s just the bane of an MSP owner’s life– having that inconsistency on the help desk. With Pia’s automation injected into the help desk, it gets done correctly every time, the first time.”

Another benefit for adopting Pia’s help desk solution is that there is no right or wrong MSP that can effectively implement the solution. Pia’s platform is in use with large platform MSPs, and also offers support for smaller MSPs.

What’s ahead for Pia

Pia’s focus for the future is on continuing its work to improve help desks for organizations to make them more scalable, consistent, efficient, and profitable. Allen says that the current iteration of their solution helps 25-45 percent of an MSPs service desk tickets or service requests that are coming through.

“We want to increase that to 50, 60, 80 percent of those tickets,” Allen mentioned. “We have a philosophy of taking a ticket from any angle within the help desk and advancing that ticket as far as we can, using the technology before it has to either close out or hop off to a human to go and do the work.”

Pia will be working towards addressing one of the biggest challenges MSPs face: trading time for dollars. And Pia understands the importance of time to an MSP, Allen said.

Recently, Pia introduced a new integration gateway feature in its latest platform release. The gateway allows partners to effectively integrate with any tool within their stack that they can gain API access to. This helps partners integrate seamlessly into the Pia platform.

“For those MSPs who want to integrate with more tools, they can now integrate tools seamlessly into the Pia platform to perform automations within Pia,” said Allen. “Previously, they would have to rely on us to build the integrations for them and wait for those to come onto the platform. Now we’ve built a brand new Integration Gateway where they can go into the platform and connect third-party software applications very easily themselves.”

Pia also intends to launch another game-changing feature in the coming weeks, Allen said, adding that it will be another big splash around what AI is doing for their partners and help take the MSP community to another level.

Channel vendors are continuing their work with AI to help MSPs maximize their business outcomes and provide the best service to clients. Read more about how other channel partners are contributing to the AI boom.