Webinars
Shift Happens: Support That Starts With the User, Not the Ticket
MSPs have navigated a support delivery shift before, from desk-side field engineers to the remote help desk and RMM. This one is faster. On October 27 we show Agent-X live, open the beta waitlist, and lay out how to position your MSP to thrive in the agentic era.
Matt Ruck · October 14, 2026 · 5 min read
Most MSPs have more tier one techs than any other kind. That is the bottom of the pyramid, and it is the part changing shape. Over the next few years the MSP community will hire techs at a slower pace, with more of those hires in the higher tiers and fewer generalists and L1 engineers.
MSPs have navigated a support delivery shift before, from onsite and desk-side field engineers to the remote help desk and RMM tools. We ran designDATA, a $30M+ MSP on ConnectWise Manage, for 28 years, and we made that move with everyone else. This time it is going to happen far more rapidly, and there is little time to lose. The question for an owner is not whether. It is whether you lead it or chase it.
- October 27, 1pm ET
- Shift Happens, live on Teams. Agent-X shown end to end.
- 1 day
- To set up your platform and your branded Agent-X application.
- 30 minutes
- Per client after that. The setup labor is the part we removed.
- Assist-X clients first
- Beta availability is limited and their onboarding is far simpler.
Support that starts with the user, not the ticket. That is the shift.
Three shifts, one direction
Ellen named the webinar, and the name stuck because it is three things at once.
1. Where support happens
From 1990 to about 2010, support was an engineer in a car. From 2010 the help desk went remote, and RMM made one engineer responsible for buildings they never visited. The owners who moved early on remote support set the price and the margin for a decade. Everyone else spent that decade catching up.
The next move is a channel where the end user resolves the issue themselves, inside an application that carries your name, and only the work that needs an engineer reaches your team. The password reset, the Teams meeting they cannot join, access to a channel or a shared mailbox, the print queue, the VPN. These start where the user is, and most of them end there.
2. Who you hire
To say it plainly: fewer generalists and fewer L1 engineers, hired more slowly, with the hires you do make higher up the pyramid. Your engineers are already more productive, and Assist-X hands each of them back 45 to 60 minutes a day. Agent-X takes the volume that was never a good use of an engineer out of the queue entirely.
Under a fixed-fee agreement every ticket you absorb is cost, so the MSP that gets there first grows accounts without growing the bottom of the pyramid at the same rate. The MSP that gets there last is defending a price per user against an unchanged cost base, at the moment clients start expecting AI-era pricing.
3. What you build for clients
The projects change too. The work moves from the systems you maintain for a client to the systems they run their business on: solving a business problem, building an automation for them rather than for your own back office. That is where Agent-X goes after beta, and it is a different relationship from supporting their IT.
What we are showing on October 27
Your name on the desktop
A Windows client under your brand, where the end user starts the work and most of it finishes there.
Microsoft 365 self-service
Password resets, Teams access, channels, lists and shared mailboxes, plus the everyday desktop issues: print queues, VPN, OneDrive, Outlook.
Approvals stay inside the client
A request to join a distribution group or a channel routes to the person who owns that resource. The change is made when they say yes.
The engineer gate
Anything that needs elevated access, or anything you have gated, stops at an engineer. The user can ask for a live engineer in the chat at any point.
ConnectWise Manage every time
A ticket and a time entry whether Agent-X resolved it alone or handed it off, and a granular audit log. Escalations arrive with subject, type, subtype, time and notes already filled in, ready for edits.
Setup measured in hours
A day for your platform and your branded application, then about 30 minutes per client. The labor that made this kind of automation shelfware is gone.
The beta
The waitlist opens on October 27. Availability is limited, and existing Assist-X clients come first because their onboarding is far simpler. The macOS client and the connections to business applications beyond Microsoft 365 are the second release.
Three ways to take this further
- 01
Register for Shift Happens
Monday, October 27, 1pm Eastern, on Teams. Save your seat.
- 02
Book time with Matt
A conversation about your service desk, on your own tickets. Pick a time.
- 03
Meet in Orlando
Matt is at ConnectWise Evolve and IT Nation, November 2 to 6. Book a slot, note Orlando, and we will find you there.