Moovila, an autonomous project monitoring and management platform vendor, has been using AI “before it was cool,” as its founder Mike Psenka likes to say. AI helps enable the Moovila platform, and the vendor is building in more AI capabilities.

Psenka will be part of “The AI Revolution in IT Services: Leading Vendors Share Their Vision for MSP Success” panel at the MSP Summit Sept. 16 in Orlando, Fla. He’ll appear alongside Cylerian CEO Vijay Akasapu and Blackpoint Cyber CSO Wilfredo Santiago in a panel moderated by Canalys analyst Jay McBain.

I caught up with Psenka for a realistic conversation about what AI can do - and can't do - for project management and what it all means for MSPs that Moovila sells through.

Mike Psenka

“It's pretty clear that AI is going to be taking over a lot of the repetitive, simple tasks,” Psenka said. “But the research is also showing -- and MSPs probably don’t know this -- that these gen AI tools can’t manage complex structured work. They don't deal with them. They can't track them. There isn't a clear line of sight for these LLMs in a more complex structure, they’re just not viable for complex work. If you think about the future and what kind of work humans, certainly in the near term, are going to need to continue to manage.”

What does that mean for MSPs? “It means if you have work for your customers that's not a simple one-off task, that more sophisticated project work isn't going to get replaced by an AI process or a vendor in the channel saying, ‘Hey, we're just going to self-heal, we're just going to fix that thing on our own,’” Psenka said.

“This idea of engaging your customers with larger, more structured project work isn't going to go away anytime soon. So MSPs need to build capabilities and competencies. I think MSPs can bring in consultants and analysts and training if they can afford it. But if you're a 10-to-15-person shop, you're not going to spend $100,000 on consultants and training. And then if you up-level your engineers and they leave... there's just so much risk.”

That doesn’t mean Moovila is giving up on using AI. It’s actually the opposite. Psenka said his company will continue to incorporate AI where it makes the most sense.

“Because we operate in the world of structured work and automating structured work, and because we have a repeatable, deterministic, and white-hat interpretable AI engine, it means we can enable them and educate them on this transformation and help them manage that work and automate it,” he said of his MSP customers. “We're excited about that, and even more excited in this market because we can help that transformation by delivering content to them, novel content, guiding them, automating them through that new content so they can deploy it cost-effectively to their engineers and organization.”

He said he's also excited about Mentor Plus, a new component that Moovila is preparing to roll out to help MSPs. He expects general release of Mentor Plus in the coming months.

“Think about it sort of like an in-app LMS [Learning Management System] around not only education of the platform but education on content in the platform,” Psenka said. “That content is broken out with curriculums set up for roles in the business. Are you an engineer? Are you a project manager or coordinator? Are you on the admin side?

“Users will be able to customize how they track and manage that education. But it's interactive to their work. They can run these lessons against their projects and their data. They can load best practice templates around common things that MSPs do, so they can get educated and trained on how to digitally transform their work around these items. The great part about this is, as these MSPs have turnover or processes they want to educate on, they don't have to re-onboard people on that education. The best practices are immediately available to all their staff.”