Losing Your Ticket Data: How Atera’s Automation Shifts Baseline Control to Vendors

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[00:00:53] Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. Somewhere about 18 months from now, a provider is sitting across from a client, explaining how much work the automation took away. The client asks how much there used to be. And nobody in the room can answer.

[00:01:21] This is the business of tech. I'm Dave Solt. The thing you count when you invoice a client is being retired. And the companies retiring it are the ones who sell you your tools. The ticket. We'll start with Atera, which makes the software a lot of providers run their service desk on. 13,000 customers, about half of them MSPs. Its autonomous agent is called Robin. And the company does not sell it on a demo. It sells it on a guarantee.

[00:01:52] Within 90 days of onboarding, half your Tier 1 and complex Tier 2 tickets get handled by Robin, with no person touching them. If that doesn't happen, the fees are waived. That's not a projection. That's a contract term. It's worth understanding how a company gets confident enough to write that down. CEO Gil Peckleman walked through it on this show in June. Before you sign anything, you sign an NDA.

[00:02:19] Then you hand Atera six months of your own ticket history. Atera runs those tickets through Robin, one by one. And Robin marks each one as something it could have closed on its own or not. Then they come back and show you the list. Here are your tickets. Here are the ones you are never going to see again. The company is explicit about where that leads. In reporting from Channel EDE, Atera calls it the death of the ticket and draws the pricing conclusion out loud.

[00:02:49] Providers should move to outcome-based billing and start running on new numbers. Avoided tickets. Autonomous resolution rate. Acronis shipped a piece of the same thing in July. Its AI service desk turns alerts into tickets and drafts the resolution. In the company's own announcement, it's free, but only to partners on a commitment contract. Pay-as-you-go partners are excluded.

[00:03:14] Ninja One, which says it serves 40,000 customers across 140 countries, wired its endpoint data straight into ServiceNow. An alert opens an incident. Asset and patch state update on their own. Nobody types anything. And Channel Insider quotes Ingram Micro's Victor Baez on what partners are saying out loud now. A lot of them, in his words, are talking about doubling their business without hiring anybody.

[00:03:41] Every one of those is a ticket that never gets created or never gets worked, which leaves an open question about what are you going to put in front of a client at renewal. To see why that question is harder than it sounds, look at what a ticket actually is. If you're listening to this and you haven't hit follow yet, on Apple Podcasts, search Business of Tech. It takes five seconds and you'll get the next episode automatically.

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[00:04:40] Try Control Map for free today. Visit scalepad.com slash Dave to get started. That's scalepad.com slash Dave. A ticket is a record that work happened. An avoided ticket is a record of nothing at all. And nothing is very difficult to invoice. So everything replacing the ticket rests on a number that can only be produced one way.

[00:05:07] By counting what used to happen before you changed it. And that count has to be taken in advance. Because once the automation is running, the thing you needed to measure is gone. Which is why Atera asks for six months of tickets. And why it asks before you sign. Only one party in that transaction has a commercial reason to build the baseline. And it's the party selling the automation. The measurement does get made.

[00:05:33] It just gets made by the counterparty on the counterparty's model and handed back to you as a finding. And consider what accumulates on the other side of that. Atera has 13,000 customers. Every evaluation it runs hands over another shop's complete operational history. So the party best positioned to know what normal looks like across this entire market is not an analyst firm. And it's not you.

[00:06:01] And you can't reconstruct it afterward. Because the ground moves. Peckleman had said something in June that got almost no attention. Ticket volume goes up when Robin is switched on. Not down. Up. Up. People who never bothered to ask for help start asking. Because the thing answering is fast and doesn't make them feel stupid. The denominator grows while the labor underneath it shrinks.

[00:06:29] One company can state its number. And the reason is instructive. AT&T says its incident system prevented about 13.1 million field dispatches and 12 million hours of customer downtime in a single year. 12 million hours is roughly 1,400 years of somebody's service being down. It can produce that because it started building in 2018 and has been counting dispatches ever since.

[00:06:58] Eight years of the four. Without it, what you have is assertion. Peckleman says Atera has customers who took headcount down 90%. Visa is cutting 2,600 people and naming AI. Microsoft took its service organization from roughly 50,000 to 40, claiming $750 million a year. 10,000 people, $750 million. That works out to be about $75,000 ahead.

[00:07:26] Which is to say the savings and payroll might be the same number. Now the measured picture. Stanford's Economic Policy Institute finds that since 2022, unemployment among the workers most exposed to AI rose 77 hundredths of a point. The least exposed rose 85. The exposed group did slightly better. And the productivity gains that show up reliably in controlled experiments have not shown up in the aggregate numbers yet.

[00:07:55] Read that the right way around. The workers everyone said were about to be automated out of a job are, so far, doing slightly better than the ones nobody worried about. So the number you carry into a renewal is one somebody else produced about work nobody can see in a category the public record already says does not add up. Which would be survivable if the person you were telling it to hadn't already made up their mind.

[00:08:25] Bring that into the room where you have to say it out loud, because the person on the other side of the table changed while you were building the offer. Gallup with Bentley University has run the same survey on American attitudes towards AI for four years now. This year, 39% said AI does more harm than good. 9% said more good than harm. That is not a split. That is more than four to one.

[00:08:51] Among adults under 30, the people staffing your clients' front lines, the share calling it more harmful, went from 27% to 47%. That took two years, and roughly three out of four Americans now say they have little or no confidence in companies to use AI responsibly. Read the object of that last sentence carefully. Not the technology, companies. The ones deploying it.

[00:09:21] Then, the people who actually have to use this stuff. In a survey from Aptavist, a technology consultancy that sells services into this exact problem, so weigh it accordingly, 42% of workers said they spend more time checking AI output than the AI saves them. 55% said it is making their team less efficient, not more.

[00:09:47] 65% said they feel nostalgic for how work went before. Those are your clients' employees. Those are the people whose experience gets reported upward when somebody asks whether the new arrangement is working. So here's the meeting you're actually scheduling. You walk in with a number you did not produce, describing work that left no trace, and hand it to a buyer whose own staff has been telling them all year that AI costs more than it returns.

[00:10:17] That is not a hard conversation. That is a conversation you lose on arrival, no matter how well the automation actually performed. There is a version of this that goes well, and it doesn't require you to be AT&T. It's the provider who walks into that room with two dated numbers, what the year looked like before, and what it looks like now, and lets the client draw the conclusion themselves. That provider isn't arguing about whether the AI worked.

[00:10:46] They're the only one in the room who can show it. Which makes this a calendar decision before it's a strategic one. You can build your own baseline while you still have tickets to count. Your volume, your categories, your mix on your books, dated and kept. So the number you can carry into that room is one you produced and can produce again next year. Or you can hand six months of your history to the company quoting you the savings

[00:11:13] and spend every renewal from here forward negotiating against a measurement you do not own, cannot rebuild, and never took. Which turns a large strategic problem into a much smaller and more urgent one. This episode is supported by the Small Biz Thoughts technology community. Small Biz Thoughts is designed for IT service providers who already know the technical work and want to get more intentional about how they run their business.

[00:11:42] The community focuses on the operational side of managed services, things like service agreements, pricing, process design, and the day-to-day decisions that determine whether an MSP scales cleanly or stays reactive. Members have access to a deep library of practical resources, but more importantly, they're part of ongoing conversations with peers who are actively running services businesses and willing to compare notes on what's working. It's deliberately practical, deliberately focused,

[00:12:10] and built around helping MSPs make better business decisions over time. If you want to see how the community works, you can find the details at smallbizthoughts.org. Why do we care? Because this turns out to be a records question, and records questions get settled by whoever configured retention four years ago and never looked at it again.

[00:12:35] Go find out how far back your PSA actually keeps closed-ticket detail and whether that history survives a platform migration. Because the vendors pitching you autonomy are frequently the same ones pitching you a migration. Export the last 24 months into something you control this month, while the export still contains something worth having, because that baseline is going to get built either way, and the only question actually in play

[00:13:03] is whether you end up holding a copy. So what to consider? Check what your retention policy keeps, not just how far back it goes. Most PSAs hold the ticket record considerably longer than they hold the parts that make it scorable. Time entries, technician notes, resolution detail, reopen history. A count of 4,000 closed tickets proves nothing at the renewal. The distribution underneath it is the entire asset,

[00:13:30] and that's usually the layer on a shorter purge schedule. Freeze your category taxonomy before you automate anything and write down the version you froze. The fastest way to destroy a baseline is not deleting it. It's remapping your categories 18 months from now so that the before and the after aren't comparable, which happens by default during any platform change. If your ticket types shift underneath you, you will still have all the data

[00:14:00] and no longer have a measurement. Count the demand that never became a ticket because that's the number about to move. A terrace says half of employees bypass ticketing entirely, and Peckleman says volume climbs once the autonomous agent is switched on, which means your ticket count was already understating real demand and is about to understate it differently. Pick one month, deliberately count what arrives by hallway, direct email, and chat,

[00:14:28] and keep that figure next to your ticket total so you know what you were absorbing off the books. If this trend continues, within 12 to 18 months, Show Me Your Ticket Volume from Before You Automated becomes a standard line item in renewal negotiations and acquisition diligence, and the providers who can't produce it will discover that the case for their last two years of pricing lives in a file their vendor owns. This is the business of tech.

[00:14:59] What would you fix in your business with the right playbook? Small Biz Thoughts members get a library of templates and operational resources, recorded member calls, and classes through IT Service Provider University. Operational education built specifically for independent MSPs. Start at smallbizthoughts.org. Interested in advertising? Head to mspradio.com slash engage.

[00:15:28] The Business of Tech is written and produced by me, Dave Solt, under ethics guidelines posted at businessof.tech. Thanks for listening. I'll see you on the next episode. Proud member of the MSP Radio Network.