'If you're not doing that yet, I challenge you to assign someone on your team the project of getting the priority of tickets set with AI. With Thread, that's just the baseline. We'll guarantee a positive ROI on our whole platform, just from you doing priority and categorizing of tickets. But we would consider that basic assistive AI today,' says Bobby Jacobs, head of growth at Thread.
Bobby Jacobs made it very clear that he hates service tickets.
"They're the worst," Jacobs this week told an audience of MSPs at the XChange March 2026 conference.
However, Jacobs, who is head of growth at Thread, the New York-based developer of a service collaboration platform for MSPs, said that service tickets remain important in terms of MSPs knowing what is happening in their business.
[Related: Thread CEO On $18M Funding: AI Is Turning The MSP Service Desk Into A 'System Of Action']
"You need to know what your most common ticket type is," he said. "You need to know what the most expensive tickets are, the most expensive customers, so on and so forth. Do you know where you're profitable? And you do that by every Monday morning, making sure your team has done all their time entries and statuses and the boards are right, and your types and subtypes and items and priorities [are right]."
At the same time, MSPs' technicians want to be IT superheroes, Jacobs said.
"So there's this battle, maybe weekly, maybe daily, between your technicians and your service desk manager, and it's the tickets' fault," he said. "This is happening in every MSP. It's terrible. So tickets are the worst."
XChange March 2026 was hosted by CRN parent The Channel Company this week in Orlando, Fla.
MSPs are trying to build services while increasing gross margins, and many are eyeing potential exit strategies or acquisitions in particular, Jacobs said. Others are looking to build the MSP of the future, he said.
"Everybody does white-glove service, right?" he said. "We all feel really good about answering the phone when our customers call. [All MSPs] probably said, 'Service is what we do best, that our customers love us. We have these relationships.' Relationships are super important. But the future of the MSP is not artisanal when it comes to level-one tickets and level-two tickets. And if you're in a place where you're [saying], 'I don't agree. I want to do level-one tickets by hand for the rest of my life,' you should probably sell your MSP because it's at the peak. It's never going to get better for you because a lot of MSPs are able to automate level-one and level-two tickets, and their margins are exploding right now."
AI-based service intelligence is key to increasing the efficiency of managing service tickets, Jacobs said. He guessed up to 20 percent of MSPs are already using AI to manage ticket priorities and setting ticket types and subtypes, and said that is now becoming table stakes.
"It's a great place to start," he said. "If you're not doing that yet, I challenge you to assign someone on your team the project of getting the priority of tickets set with AI. With Thread, that's just the baseline. We'll guarantee a positive ROI on our whole platform, just from you doing priority and categorizing of tickets. But we would consider that basic assistive AI today."
The real boost in efficiency will come as MSPs start using agents powered by an intelligence layer with information from their knowledge base, from previous tickets and from real-time events, Jacobs said.
"And the agents are using this intelligence to solve tickets intelligently and to provide that white-glove service that maybe a human is not involved in or barely involved in," he said.
At the next level, Thread provides a unified conversational interface that lets MSPs take calls and emails along with chats in Teams, Slack, desktop or SMS, and all of that forming an omnichannel, Jacobs said.
"That is the future MSP," he said. "That is how you get to play this new game where you're going to be a managed intelligence provider. You're going to sell AI services to your customers."
The average MSP today has around 200 endpoints per technician, Jacobs said. Those managing 400 endpoints per technician are probably charging too little for their service, while those managing 100 endpoints per technician are hopefully charging more, he said.
What's important here is that the price per seat is falling industrywide, he said.
"There are already MSPs who have automated 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent of their tickets, and they're able to reset their prices," he said. "And as they're doing that, it's opening up a huge market of SMBs and midmarket companies who haven't worked with MSPs in the past. So it's not a sad story. It's actually an awesome story, where the MSP market is exploding, and as prices come down, it's going to get bigger. But to play this new game, you can't be an artisanal, handcrafted MSP."
Winning here means adding intelligence to increase margins while reducing prices to customers, Jacobs said.
"When a ticket comes in, how fast is that being solved?" he said. "Our partners are seeing significant increases in faster time resolution."
In the traditional way of managing service tickets, an end user reaches out via email or Teams, and it may take 20 minutes to an hour for the MSP to respond, at which point the user has moved on, Jacobs said.
"And now maybe it's rolling into the next day before you really start going back and forth with this end user to solve this ticket," he said. "I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like a magical experience to me. And that's the reality of a lot of tickets today."
With agentic AI, the initial ticket can be generated immediately, and the AI agent can immediately respond, Jacobs said. For example, if the customer wants help setting up their email on their phone, the AI agent can ask what type of phone is being used and can then look up the support information from the support documents and immediately give it to the user, he said. And once the user is satisfied, the agent can close the ticket and ask the customer about their experience, he said.
For most tickets, the agent can do some triage, do some back and forth, get some information, but then a technician may need to get involved, Jacobs said.
Thread is already working with nearly 1,000 MSPs and building one of the biggest communities around AI for MSPs who are talking about how important community and partnerships are, Jacobs said.
"About 150 MSPs every week join a call," he said. "We did 16 billion tokens with OpenAI last month, so we're doing this at scale," he said. "I highly recommend checking it out."
Jay Mellon, CEO of AtNetPlus, a Stow, Ohio-based MSP, told CRN that his company has a love-hate relationship with service tickets.
"If we didn't have tickets, we wouldn't have a business. But, yes, it can be a challenge at times," Mellon said.
"Conceptually, the idea of automating tickets is absolutely something we subscribe to," he said. "It's something that we've actually been investing a lot of time and money into, both with tools from other vendors and things we've developed ourselves. And we've got two people on the team whose role is to invest in in automation and workflow improvements just for ourselves."
Thread is a company that AtNetPlus could partner with in the future, Mellon said.
"We're absolutely receptive to it," he said. "We think they're moving in the right direction."
