Sidekick is a bot that is currently available for ConnectWise PSA, although the number of solutions supported will expand over time, providing much stronger AI capabilities than ConnectWise was able to offer before.
Jeff Bishop, Chief Product Officer at ConnectWise
ORLANDO – At the IT Nation event here, ConnectWise announced ConnectWise Sidekick, a purpose-built AI companion for technology solution providers. It is designed to automate complex tasks and provide increased efficiency for faster problem resolution. ConnectWise Sidekick for PSA is the first version to be released, but there will be more.
Sidekick is a Generative AI based reworking of the type of AI solutions that ConnectWise had been providing previously.
“We had been building out traditional AI models like everyone else, until OpenAI and ChatGPT became a thing almost a year ago,” said Jeff Bishop, Chief Product Officer at ConnectWise. “Our focus on this area picked up significantly after ChatGPT went live. A solution like Sidekick can streamline ticket management so that everything will now go so much faster than what we were doing with AI before.”
ConnectWise Sidekick leverages ConnectWise’s proprietary generative AI models and large language models to enable technology solution providers to use natural-language prompts for automation and timesaving. It automates tasks like generating PowerShell scripts, ticket categorization, summarization, providing resolutions, and automated responses to end users, resulting in faster service ticket resolution times and consistent exceptional customer experiences.
“Each of these Generative AI models operates on a microservice or set of data,” Bishop said. “They can be service aware or contextually aware. There will be some that work on application-level things like CRM, and others that can sit above all the applications and work off all of them.” The AI is utilized across sales modules, finance modules, agreements and invoicing, project management modules, and time management modules to drive efficiency and resource optimization. ConnectWise also provides documentation modules with semantic search capabilities for more relevant information retrieval.
“Sidekick checks ConnectWise University and brings back not just links but an actual answer,” Bishop said. “It delivers helpful high-quality suggestions to close tickets faster.”
In total, Sidekick will deliver millions of AI-powered predictions daily across ConnectWise’s suite of solutions. The aim is to make every organizational role more efficient, from technicians to service managers, sales and marketing, and owners. Sidekick for PSA centralizes information access within Microsoft Teams and facilitates streamlined updates for all teams.
“In addition to being inside Teams and inside the PSA, Sidekick is also inside a few other product lines that we haven’t shown,” Bishop indicated. “The details of this is something that will be revealed in the January-February timeframe.”
“Sidekick is an AI powered digital systems built into Teams that augments your capabilities in a way that is incredibly natural,” said Jake Varghese, Executive Vice President and General Manager, Business Management, at ConnectWise. “It shows the overall sentiment of customers over time.”
Another feature is that Sidekick does all this in more than ten languages today.
“It uses Generative AI to do the translation and make it available to you,” Varghese added. “It shows a summary in English and lets you respond in, for example, Spanish.”
Over 70 use cases are currently live, and that number is likely to expand significantly.
“We are just getting started,” Varghese said. In theory, there could be as many models as makes sense to solve the number of problems for partners have, although setting anything close to a total number is tough.
