If your MSP isn’t using AIOps, is it the right MSP for you?

Today, forward-thinking managed service providers (MSPs) are seeking a competitive edge to stand out among their peers, and AIOps is helping them do so.

AIOps, or AI for IT operations, provides an edge because it focuses on automating IT service delivery. It brings efficiency, reduces costs, and ultimately improves customer service quality in IT managed services.  If your MSP isn’t serious about incorporating AI for IT operations (AIOps) into its business, it probably isn’t the right provider to help you grow your business.

As Integris CEO Glenn Mathis has noted, “If your IT operation isn’t showing progress on automation, there’s a good chance your technology spending is financing overhead, not business advantage.”

Why AIOps is critical to MSPs and organizations

As AI begins to transform business processes, IT operations has become a prime target for automation. Why? IT departments preside over many tasks for users—password resets, help desk ticket routing, software installation and updates, and hardware and software monitoring for cyberthreats—that can benefit from automation.

Many of these tasks save time by reducing the time load of repetitive tasks on human workers. Task automation also reduces human error, standardizes processes, and improves service for users. International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates that AI-powered automation in quality assurance will grow by 40% over the next five years.  

Data suggests that customers, too, now see the merits of automating tasks. In fact, 71% of organizations are actively exploring AI-driven IT service management solutions to enhance efficiency, reduce ticket volumes, and improve service delivery, according to the Service Desk Institute’s “State of AI in ITSM, 2024 and Beyond.”  An AIOps platform for example, can reduce operational issues, such as system downtime, by 30%, which significantly alleviates the huma burden of fire-fighting tasks.

Integris, a national managed service provider (MSP), has spent 2025 building automation into its IT operations, which includes more than 125 automated tasks and processes. As a result, Integris has gotten more efficient, saving countless hours and dollars along the way, and helped improve customer service.

How Integris is using AIOps

Let’s explore some of the key automations that Integris has implemented.

Intelligent help desk ticket routing. Manual help desk ticket routing is time-consuming and may not match the ideal IT technician with a problem. At Integris, human dispatchers have traditionally identified a user’s issue and allocated IT help desk tickets to a technician. When dispatchers were out of the office, this function could fall to Integris L1 technicians, who work on first-level IT issues. Ticket routing took time from their other tasks.

Now, an AI agent routes tickets to technicians with the right expertise—based on industry-specific issues, technology focus, and level of expertise among technicians. Intelligent help desk ticket routing has saved Integris up to 30 minutes of administrative work per ticket. It also provides users with the technician with the right skills for the needed service.

And customer issues get resolved more quickly. “We are able to get the right resource involved earlier, while ‘shifting the work left’ [that is, use less human intervention] to resolve issues up to 50% faster” said Dr. Brian Luckey, chief information officer at Integris.

And while industry observers have expressed concern about the impact of automation on headcount, Integris isn’t eliminating roles. Instead, it’s reassigning them to new, more skilled ones. So while automation is changing employees’ tasks at Integris, it is not displacing them.

Client retention and predictive customer churn strategy. Among managed service providers, average customer churn rate is about 17%. But the reality is that customers decide to change MSPs some 9 to 12 months prior to announcing their departure. Understanding early signals of client dissatisfaction helps Integris address problems early on, enhancing the relationship and solving issues before they trigger a departure.  

Integris is inputting various potential triggers into an AI model, such as contract renewal dates, customer sentiment data, CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores, and sales data. By combining these data points into a “churn score,” Integris can intervene to proactively reduce churn and boost client satisfaction. According to one estimate, a reliable churn score can reduce customer departure churn by as much as 15% to 25%.

Customer communications. Customers may receive inconsistent or off-brand communications from different team members. That can create customer confusion and poor retention.

Using AI, Integris standardizes adoption guides, service updates, and other customer communications with high-quality and scalable content. AI models are trained in voice, tone, and accurate service guidance. As a result, clients get the benefit of clearer, more accurate communications on services.

Customer IT environment health scoring. Downtime is costly in myriad ways, including lost productivity and reputational damage. But downtime can be prevented by diagnosing IT issues predictively—again, by applying a score.

The ability to score a client’s IT environment represents a “massive shift from reactive to proactive visibility into their infrastructure,” according to Luckey. With AI and the aggregation of data, the client experience team can monitor a customer’s environment and assign it a health score based on performance metrics, security logs, and configuration data.

When a customer’s environment score drops below a threshold, it triggers an alert before an outage occurs. This enables Integris to deploy predictive intervention, allowing a client to address issues before a potential problem escalates into a customer-facing crisis. Integris also displays health scores, alerts, and remediations all within its proprietary client portal. These insights allow clients to get insight into the value of their services and see cyberthreats thwarted, downtime averted, and other value-adding outcomes, within a transparent, easy-to-use platform.

AI-driven project scope and risk assessment. When MSPs embark on a new client project, resource allocation can be difficult to evaluate, and proper project scope at the outset is critical. According to CIO.com, using AI for project management can increase efficiency by 30%.

With AI, Integris provides much-needed assistance and resource allocation before project scope is finalized, Luckey said. Many times, MSPs have the wrong number of resources applied to projects. “Our goal is to address that while the scope is being defined by our solution architects with the client, ensuring we have the right skills and people available to fulfill projects for clients,” Luckey said. Ultimately, better resourcing ensures smoother client engagements, better outcomes, and more cost optimization of the project as a whole.

Predictive security vulnerabilities. As cyberthreats become more pervasive, MSPs need to stay ahead of new modes of attack. Integris uses AI to analyze system configuration, threat intelligence, and unpatched vulnerabilities. With these inputs, the team can better predict where the next cyberthreat is likely to appear, then patch and harden gaps before they become a point of attack. About 56% of MSPs are using AI to detect and predict cyberthreats, according to one estimate.

Using AI to address vulnerabilities is becoming essential. At the same time, according to the Ponemon Institute, only 50% of respondents say their security posture has improved with AI because an organization can better prioritize threats and vulnerabilities.

For known threats, AI can significantly speed up threat remediation. However, even when a threat is known, it can be difficult to understand all the infrastructure resources that are affected. With AI, the team can present a vulnerability, run it through AI, and identify which firewalls are affected. The next step is to notify the client.

Automated self-healing systems. For IT departments, the goal is to create systems that can address problems autonomously, such as system downtime.While achieving self-healing systems is the North Star, it will take time to realize self-healing for certain processes. “We don’t want to fully empower AI to make decisions, then find that something is broken. The end goal is having a system that detects, diagnoses, and remediates the root cause of problems automatically with zero engineering time.”

How AIOps is creating efficiency and productivity at Integris

By applying automation to IT operations, thus far Integris has saved in total more than 26,000 hours of human effort, equivalent to a capacity of 160 full-time roles, over the course of eight months.

In an AI-driven business landscape, inaction is a strategic disadvantage for MSPs—and their customers–surrendering market share to competitors that effectively use automation to deliver efficiency and proactive services to customers. 

A next-generation MSP doesn’t just manage devices or technology. It manages IT environments strategically with a holistic model that focuses on managing clients’ entire digital estate—powered by AI. This is the heart of becoming a “managed intelligence provider,” or MSP that manages digital assets to protect them from cyberthreat and create ROI from the data’s business intelligence.

Ultimately, Integris has saved time and money with AI. With 125-plus automations created, Integris has saved more than 26,000 hours within the past year and achieved an 8% positive impact on EBITDA, resulting in significant time and cost savings.

Next, Integris will adapt its technology foundation to build key automations for key customer needs.